I just want to warn that there will be spoilers for the book and its sequels (Lasher and Taltos) here. Mainly because I'm so annoyed by them that I just need to complain.

The Witching Hour, for the most part, is really intriguing, mysterious, haunting, and a wonderful book. It's huge and long-winded, and it goes through the geneaology of a family of witches that live in New Orleans. One person in each generation is followed by this ghostly protector who likes to get a little frisky with them.

A lot of the narrative follows Rowan Redfern, who is the current generation's witch who doesn't know of her heritage, and Michael Curry, a man she saves from drowning who saw visions near death about her past. Their story had me turning pages. The complex weaving of the family history and the tragedy involved had me turning pages. And what do I get in the end?

CRAP! PURE AND UTTER CRAP!

Here's where spoilers start kicking in. Either save yourself and read the book, or follow me as I bitch and moan about how Anne Rice ruined a wonderful story.

After Rowan gets pregnant by the ghostly protector's child and starts going all wonky, the rest of the story just falls apart. In Lasher, she gives birth to the ghost in human form and runs away with it.

Well, it's not exactly human. It's this super being whose goal is to boink every Mayfair woman in order to try and have a baby that will be another super being, so he can mate with THAT baby and make a whole new race of super beings. And the sick thing is, the only woman who can bear this super being he has to sleep with is Rowan, who's technically his mother. So he's sleeping with his mother and his daughter. It's like some horrible science fiction B-movie gone wrong.

And then in Taltos, it gets even worse. They had killed off the super beings and thought everything was over. Well, they find out that the super beings aren't as unique as they thought they were. There used to be a massive race of them who lived 5000 years ago. And there's one who's still alive. He's this super businessman in NYC who enlists in their help to find other super beings.

It TOTALLY takes away from the mysteriousness of The Witching Hour. Lasher isn't some special, unique, creepy ghost. He's a leftover renmant of a mutant species. It FOREVER RUINED the wonderfulness of the first book for me. I wish to God Anne Rice had stayed with the Mayfair witches as its focal point, instead of using this stupid stupid stupid race of super beings plot. She should have found something else for Lasher to be. She should have, if she was soooo determined to write about these super beings, saved them for a whole separate book unrelated to the Mayfair witches. Because SHE RUINED IT.

I'm done now. Really.

11-18-2002

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