The Plot
Michael Curry, a successful forty-eight-year-old San Francisco contractor, has his life blighted by a near-death experience. After slipping off rocks and almost drowning in San Francisco Bay, he is rescued by a mysterious woman in a passing boat. He discovers that by touching objects and people with his hands, he acquires access to other lives and events. These insights are fragmentary, as is his memory of an encounter with otherworldly beings during his drowning, when he promised to fulfill a mission for them. He discusses his occult powers with the press and becomes a celebrity, a confusing development that he rejects by becoming a recluse and shutting down his business.
One of Michael’s doctors puts him in touch with his rescuer, who Michael believes will help him understand what he is meant to do with his occluded occult knowledge. His rescuer, Rowan Mayfair, is a superb surgeon, thirty years old, and an ash-blonde beauty. Michael falls in love with her. She, like Michael, is searching for answers. She has the power to hurt and to heal people. She can stop a patient’s bleeding by a laying on of hands; she also can cause a person’s heart attack or stroke if she does not control her rage. Her obsession with saving people is her effort at self-redemption. Michael hopes that touching Rowan and her boat will bring back his sense of mission, and Rowan hopes that Michael will help reveal her past.
Rowan’s adoptive mother died recently, and the terms of her will have extracted from Rowan the pledge that she will never return to New Orleans, her birth family’s home. Michael, she soon learns, grew up in New Orleans. Rowan and Michael realize that their fate is linked to New Orleans, where as a boy Michael developed a fixation on a Garden District mansion that turns out to be Rowan’s ancestral home. There he saw a spectral man, the Mayfairs’ presiding spirit. Michael’s intense memories of his childhood are connected, he is sure, with his near-death experience. When Rowan’s birth mother dies, she is visited by the spectral man, and she decides that she must break her word to her adoptive mother and return to New Orleans.
Hovering around this couple is Aaron Lightner, an agent in the Talamasca, a secret order of occult scholars. Through Aaron, Michael learns that Rowan is the descendant of a family of witches, a matriarchy that has fascinated the Talamasca for nearly three hundred years. Rowan is initiated, first by Lightner and then by her own family members, into the Mayfair connection with the occult. A strong woman, she believes she can destroy Lasher, the spectral man, who has driven Mayfairs mad and killed many others in an attempt to possess the Mayfair witches and to find a way to become a creature of flesh himself, a kind of superhuman being. Like the other Mayfair witches, Rowan loses control of Lasher, who invades the cells of her fetus and emerges as a powerful boy-man. Unable to prevent this monstrous denouement, Michael is left in the Mayfair mansion, still believing that Rowan will triumph and return to him from her foreign adventures with Lasher.
Literary Techniques
Rice aims to provide readers with the essential family history of the Mayfairs, which involves presenting a substantial amount of historical information. She accomplishes this through the use of the Talamasca Order's files, which include letters and reports from occult investigators dating back to the seventeenth century. These documents detail the unusual activities of the Mayfair family, starting with Suzanne. With some creative...
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liberties, these reports and letters feature dialogue and descriptions in a fitting, somewhat old-fashioned language and style, offering the story with ample detail and development. McGrath describes the book as "bloated" and "grown to elephantine proportions," and indeed, there is far more narrative than necessary to cover the stories of Lasher, Rowan, and Michael. There's considerable repetition; information is reiterated each time a character learns something, regardless of whether the reader is already informed. The book's 965 pages are about 300 more than needed to reach the vivid and shocking scene in chapter 51, where the climactic erotic birth/possession occurs.
The book is interspersed with erotic scenes, as Lasher is a highly sensual character who relishes giving pleasure to the various Mayfair witches. His dark intention — to take over the body of a newborn for himself — doesn't diminish the soft-porn quality of some of the writing. The book is rich with strong, compelling imagery.
Literary Precedents
Stories featuring witches appear in various works, such as the Bible's tale of the Witch of Endor, Shakespeare's Macbeth (circa 1600), Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown," and Arthur Miller's The Crucible (1953). Supernatural elements have enriched fiction in works like Walpole's The Castle of Otranto. Goethe's Faust (1790) explores the devil's quest to corrupt a human, similar to Lasher's occasional endeavors. Viewing The Witching Hour through the lens of its vivid depiction of New Orleans, George Washington Cable's The Grandissimes (1880) is an earlier novel that attempts a similar atmospheric creation.
