There’s a house in New Orleans, in the Garden district
that has slowly fallen into disrepair. It’s the residence of the core of the
Mayfair family – the Mayfair witches
For generations the Talamasca has watched the Mayfair
witches since their distant ancestor was burned at the stake in Scotland. Her descendants
since then have passed on her dangerous legacy – a magical gift and the Lasher.
A spirit of ever increasing power and dangerous, unknown motives – a creature
that definitely has blood on its hands even as it put gold in the Mayfair
pockets
And now, reaching the 13th generation of
Mayfair witches, all that knowledge over the centuries may finally be needed to
reveal the Lasher’s eventual plan.
Some books are long
Some books are very long
Some books are very very long indeed
Some books are “ye gods WHYYY?!” long
And then there’s Witching Hour which is much much longer than that.
It’s not just the length of the book – and it is a
mammoth 1,200 pages – it’s how long the book feels as well. Some books can be
really wrong and you still dive through them because they’re awesome – they
feel short. And some short books drag on because they feel long with dense,
awful writing and lack of any real pacing. Well, this was an incredibly long
book THAT FELT EVEN LONGER!
The writing is so dense and so boring and so repetitive that it is an achievement to get through. It has to be said about Anne Rice that she is good at establishing time and place with evocative description – and she certainly does that in this book. But she doesn’t do it once – every place needs this description dozens of times, over and over the same points, the same places, the same times are described again and again in really long winded terms. Any evocative sense of setting is lost in the sheer overwhelming wave of unnecessary verbiage.
There’s a lot of grossly unnecessary detail. I struggled
to start this book because we were treated to such a long winded, unnecessary
analysis of Michael’s life before we were ever given any reason to connect to
this man that I nearly gave up right there. I have no idea why we need the best
part of 100 pages to describe Michael’s past or what it added to the book. But
the same thing happens several times – Petyr can’t just be an agent of the
Talamasca, we need to know his life story first. Some random agent in the 20s
couldn’t just be a Talamasca agent, no, we needed to know his childhood, his
history, how he joined the Talamasca, who he worked with… so much information
for so little purpose. We can’t just get the story of Rita Mae, childhood
friend of Deidre – no, we need to include far too many details about Rita Mae
as well and I have absolutely no idea why I should care, why this is relevant
or why I am having to read this.
To make it worse, the repetitiveness comes in as well.
Rita Mae tells her story, then we have it repeated in Aaron’s narrative. A
doctor tells his story about Deidre – which doesn’t really add anything unique
– and then that gets repeated by Aaron. A priest tells his story, a nun tells
her story – and then all these stories get repeated again. And these stories
themselves are an exercise in redundancy. To show us how meticulous and creepy
the Talastalkers are, we get the same information from several different
sources to really drive home just how assiduously the Talastalkers have left no
stone unturned in their quest to be the creepiest of creepers. So, yet MORE
repetition!
And let’s have a swipe at the Talamasca here – because
I’m still somewhat at a loss as to what exactly they’re doing? Trying to stop
the Lasher? Well you’ve had 3 centuries of doing absolutely nothing towards
that goal. The mere thought of the Lasher makes them cower in their beds. Ok,
is it to help the family? Well you had evidence of generations of incest and
multiple murders and didn’t feel the need to intervene. So is it just
curiosity? Because that seems like a really dubious justification for centuries
of riffling through someone’s rubbish and stealing their medical records. It’s
not that curiosity isn’t a real motive – it is a very reasonable motive. But if
that is the motive then the Talamasca are severely creepy, entitled and
unethical people who feel they can intrude on someone’s life to this degree for
the sake of their own nosiness. Hence my reference to Talastalkers.
The way the book is written also makes it very hard to
connect to any “character” beyond Rowan, Michael and maybe Aaron, while at the
same time only really including them in the story in a meaningful manner at the
beginning or end. The rest of the book is one long (oh my gods how long),
recitation of history, read by Michael. It’s a really terrible way to try and
garner any sympathy or connection to the majority of the actors (I won’t call
them characters because we don’t connect to them as characters) in this book.
It’s not like reading a history book – it’s like reading about someone reading
a history book and is every bit as fascinating as it sounds. This made the vast
majority of the book to be incredibly dry without any real sense of emotional
connection. I felt I was taking notes – I wasn’t investing in people’s stories,
I was noting down facts like I was in a history lecture, lining up the
descendants and vast array of names without connecting or caring about any of
them. I didn’t feel the tragedy of Antha and Deidre, I didn’t feel the joy of
Stella or the capability of Mary Beth or the naivety of Deborah. It was too
long and it was too separate and too many of the stories were too similar. It
was just a list, Stella begat Antha, begat Deidre. And even the list wasn’t
that simple because the cloud of names, the endless incest and the awful
documenting and chronology (switching back and forth all the time really doesn’t
help things)
When we get to the end and actual action rather than
characters reading boring histories, I was thoroughly fed up. Beyond fed up. I
desperately wanted this book to be over – but at least things seemed to be
happening, at last things were beginning to be explained and expanded… and for
some reason Rowan completely transformed as a character. I have no idea what
happened to her, I have no idea why she folded completely and if the book hadn’t
already beaten me into whimpering submission I would have thrown it down in
annoyance right there.
The portrayal of minorities in this book is pretty
appalling. Black people are slaves until we reach the end of slavery – and then
they’re servants. They're well treated, highly praised and very loyal slave and servants - but they're still slaves and servants. Often with extra woo-woo insight because it’s an endless
trope that the more melanin you have the more woo-woo there is. It’s a rule. Oh
we have Michael’s old neighbourhood now being all run down and dirty and
dangerous and crime ridden and full of *gasp* Black people – the horror, the
utter horror!
The family has one bisexual member, Julien, and he is
told through the eyes of one of his lovers. Julien is singled out as the most
debauched member of the family – there’s more hatred expressed against him,
more vitriol for him being perverse and incestuous and lots of really
prejudiced, tropey lines like how Julien needed to seduce people, how he was
ruled by lust. And, of course, he was a paedophile - just to make it clear that
the bisexual is the most depraved of them all. Even other incestuous family
members (and this is the Big Book O’ Incest) like Cortland are not regarded
with anything like the same venom or viewed as being ruled by lust, some are
handled quite sympathetically (like Charlotte) or even put on pedestals (Petyr
– the Petyr did apparently dream, as a child, of being molested. Dream as in
want. Yesss…). And I have no idea what "he made love to me just as if I were a woman" is even remotely supposed to mean.
We also have some not-even-slightly-subtle anti-choice
messages really rammed into the front of the book. Not just Michaels
far-too-long (everything in this book is far-too-long) ramble about his ex
aborting a baby but then Rowan adds her reinforcement with evil abortion
doctors stealing foetuses.
My only hope after this is it’s done. I now know the
Lasher. I knew the Mayfair family in more detail than anyone could ever wish
to. It has all been set up. So Lasher and
Taltos are going to be much shorter
and more concise. Right?
Please?
This is one of the books where we’re irreconcilably torn,
and this is reflected in the fang rating. I, Sparky, cannot abide this book. If
it hadn’t been for our plan to cover Anne Rice’s linked series before October I
would have put this book down at the 20% mark and DNFed it. Having slogged the
whole way through this awful book, I’d give it 0.5 fangs. If pressed extremely
I’d stretch to 1 Fang – but in my eyes it doesn’t deserve 1 Fang. Since
starting Fangs for the Fantasy I have never read a book I have enjoyed less
than Witching Hour. Renee likes this
book and wants it to score far higher. To try and find some midpoint between us
we’ve gone for 2.5 Fangs.
