The Witching Hour by Anne Rice

This book was a little bit of a disappointment. I had stumbled upon its existence while I was searching book lists for fiction set in New Orleans, after reading The Axeman’s Jazz. I had scoured the internet for a first edition, settling for the original design with painted angels and faux candlesticks.

The reading month of October was set, the candles were lit, and I found out very quickly I was reading a trashy harlequin romance, with some odd bits of history and witchery thrown in.

The first few hundred pages went okay. Rice teased out the story of the frail Deirdre Mayfair, doomed to spend her days in a comatose, sitting on the porch of her dilapidated antebellum mansion in the old quarter of New Orleans while the bougainvillea vine wound its way into the corners of her home, but, what initially sparked curiosity, later turned to tedium after several more hundred pages.

Rice lovingly introduces each character over a session of 20 pages at a time. The Mayfair family history took up a meaty chunk of the 965 page volume, and I found this okay. The legacy of the coven had its roots in stories of Scottish midwives - in my mind’s eye I visualised a sixteenth-century maiden dancing in twilight with a very horny devil – moving on to a French colony in Africa, among tales of Voodoo practiced by the slaves, then to the sexual freedom of the flapper years in America, to the unfortunate yuppie 80s.

But it was the repetition I couldn’t stand, the fluff, the undulating monotony. Rowan and Michael, the two main protagonists, have a relationship and talk about it at length for everyone to hear. I found myself skimming pages before I engorged myself on dialogue, Also, when something happens to a character, we read about it while it is happening to them, and then read about it again when they tell another character.

No amount of sex scenes can spice up the immortal repetition the Mayfair family had been cursed with by their creator. Surely a kind editor would have been able to quicken the pace of the narrative, letting the salacious accounts of the occult and incest retain their shock factor.

It’s not all completely bad... my desire to visit New Orleans has not diminished and the hilarious reference to a woman’s bottom as kneadable has made me look at bread and GBBO in a different way.