The Witching Hour

Anne Rice

ISBN 10: 0394587863 / ISBN 13: 9780394587868

Published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1990

A Borzoi Book. Good Book/Fair Dust Jacket. First Edition as stated. First Printing. Black quarter cloth binding with dark gray paper over boards, black stamped illustration on front, black and gilt stamped title on spine, and blind stamped publisher's logo on back. Covers show edgewear, rubbing, scuff marks, scratches, and shelfwear to all extremities. Gilt is bright. Wrinkling to spine. Rubbing and sunning to spine ends. Lower corners lightly bumped. Rubbing to corners. Dust jacket shows heavy wear. Dust jacket shows age tanning, edgewear, heavy chipping, heavy creases, indentations, rubbing, scratches, scuffing, shelfwear, and tears to all extremities. Front and back panels show indentations at grooves. Front panel shows 1/4" closed tears to top and bottom edges. Spine shows indentations and rubbing with loss. Heavy chipping and creases to spine ends. Head of spine shows 1/4" open tears. Chipping, creases, rubbing, and tears to corners. Creases to front and back turns. Creases to front and back flaps. Dust jacket is not price clipped with $22.95 price on the front flap. Back flap shows tear to top edge. All edges of textblock show age tanning, scratches, shelfwear, and soiling. Top and bottom edges show smudges. Hinges sound. Binding sound and square. Pages clean and unmarked. 965 pages. 6-1/2 X 9-1/2. Seller Inventory # RIAN-01-B02-0825

Synopsis:

From the author of the extraordinary Vampire Chronicles comes a huge, hypnotic novel of witchcraft and the occult through four centuries.

Demonstrating, once again, her gift for spellbinding storytelling and the creation of legend, Anne Rice makes real for us a great dynasty of witches--a family given to poetry and to incest, to murder and to philosophy; a family that, over the ages, is itself haunted by a powerful, dangerous, and seductive being.

On the veranda of a great New Orleans house, now faded, a mute and fragile woman sits rocking . . . and The Witching Hour begins.

It begins in our time with a rescue at sea.  Rowan Mayfair, a beautiful woman, a brilliant practitioner of neurosurgery--aware that she has special powers but unaware that she comes from an ancient line of witches--finds the drowned body of a man off the coast of California and brings him to life.  He is Michael Curry, who was born in New Orleans and orphaned in childhood by fire on Christmas Eve, who pulled himself up from poverty, and who now, in his brief interval of death, has acquired a sensory power that mystifies and frightens him.

As these two, fiercely drawn to each other, fall in love and--in passionate alliance--set out to solve the mystery of her past and his unwelcome gift, the novel moves backward and forward in time from today's New Orleans and San Francisco to long-ago Amsterdam and a château in the France of Louis XIV.  An intricate tale of evil unfolds--an evil unleashed in seventeenth-century Scotland, where the first "witch," Suzanne of the Mayfair, conjures up the spirit she names Lasher . . . a creation that spells her own destruction and torments each of her descendants in turn.

From the coffee plantations of Port au Prince, where the great Mayfair fortune is made and the legacy of their dark power is almost destroyed, to Civil War New Orleans, as Julien--the clan's only male to be endowed with occult powers--provides for the dynasty its foothold in America, the dark, luminous story encompasses dramas of seduction and death, episodes of tenderness and healing.  And always--through peril and escape, tension and release--there swirl around us the echoes of eternal war: innocence versus the corruption of the spirit, sanity against madness, life against death.  With a dreamlike power, the novel draws us, through circuitous, twilight paths, to the present and Rowan's increasingly inspired and risky moves in the merciless game that binds her to her heritage. And in New Orleans, on Christmas Eve, this strangest of family sagas is brought to its startling climax.

About the Author: Anne Rice is the author of thirty-two books. She lives in Palm Desert, California.

Bibliographic Details

Title: The Witching Hour
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, New York
Publication Date: 1990
Binding: Hardcover
Condition: Good
Dust Jacket Condition: Fair
Edition: First Edition.