The Witching Hour by Anne Rice is not a book for teens. It really isn’t. And yet, as I’m watching book banning cases pop up, like this one in Virginia, I’m seeing in the comments, over and over “But I read Anne Rice when I was 13.”
And…well I did. I first read Anne Rice (Queen of the Damned) when I was 14, and quickly sucked up everything I could by her. All the Vampire Chronicles and by 15, The Witching Hour. This book is a tome of sexy rape and blurred sexual orientation and incest. It is absolutely not appropriate for younger teens, but so very many of us read it at that age! This isn’t even my first musing on The Witching Hour and now at 40+ I’m rereading it again, adding notes before I pass it on to my daughter to read for the first time, and I’m still amazed at how strongly it has shaped my taste for stories. And honestly, it isn’t even that good!
I’m sure at this point, Dear Reader, you’re wondering WTH, but that’s my point, The Witching Hour is a story of generational abuse and trauma as told by a writer who is quite drunk on merely existing. Of the main characters Michael is essentially a madman who after a near death experience has accepted a quest from ghosts that he cannot remember but is driven to see through, and Rowan is a massively powerful witch, heir to a financial and magical fortune, who…does a lot of nothing and instead is constantly victimized by the wants and drives of everyone around her. To be a ridiculously intelligent woman, she is easily seduced and swayed by unabashed dark forces. She very rarely sticks up for herself, and it seems only to justify wanting some thing like a sexual relationship with Michael, a man nearly 20 years older than her.
Perhaps this is the exact thing that so many people my age found seducing about Anne Rice’s books. There are shining moments of glorious writing buried in heaps of self indulgent assemblies of words, kind of like there are important moments to us in the overwhelming craziness of every day life. Unlike other books I read at the time, these character have no idea of their purpose, or sometimes even their own personality. Most poignant for me at certain times of my life; they have no idea of their sexual orientation, or of their own moral compass. In my teen years I read a whole lot, and I was aware that living would grow increasingly different, and numerous very dark corners existed in the world.
In The Witching Hour Rice, drunk on words, gleefully dances down a whole labyrinth of human dark corners. Rowan, who is for all exterior views is a superhero neurosurgeon who saves lives and is wealthy, powerful, and independent, also enjoys rape-like sex with men who can overpower her, and can’t resist walking down her own morally dark corridors. Michael is in almost every way a strong, also independently wealthy, self made man who has done amazing things, but he is overly sensitive and emotional, an alcoholic who increasingly can’t tell real things from unreal (from the magical), and trapped in a life already predetermined by those who came before him. Aaron Lightner, who is actually the most clearly knowledgeable about the legacy of the Mayfair witches and the dark fate they are driving toward, who literally knows these people are killers and madmen, still can’t stop himself from becoming directly involved in their future.
The Mayfairs are a family built on incest, for centuries they have bred back on themselves to try to concentrate and increase their power, yet most individuals have no idea of this, and are simply living the best lives they can. The most recent generations, Rowan and Deidre–and Deidre’s life could be an entire horror tome on its own–are being held responsible for, being forced to try to break the chain of enchantment that entangled their ancestors, without being given any information or tools to understand it. Rice’s Catholic upbringing burns through, setting up everyone of the characters, and us as well, as evil or wrong, somehow, though we have no idea why we’re suffering for things barely remembered in the far past.
That’s, I think, what I connected with as a teen. Rowan has such expectations made on her, from those who know better, those who came before, and those who just think they know better, and yet she’d discovering she’s not a superhero–a shiny morally secure Captain America. Instead she has darkness in her genes, written into her very code, that she never had a chance to resist. In the fantasy of being a Captain America it isn’t the super powers that are the fantasy, but the moral sureness. She’s terrified and guilt ridden to be somehow not good, but also denying that she also has her own darkness is denying herself from really being herself.
As a reader I reread The Witching Hour every few years, but often skip the larger story of Michael and Rowan that encompasses the vivid and detailed story of the Mayfair family. Michael’s chaotic neediness and indecision is aggravating and Rowan is so overwhelmed at any choice making that she often makes no real choice at all. It’s not a horror story because of the murders and rapes and ghosts and magic, but because the modern generation of Mayfairs, despite all the empowerments of technology and money and even the Talamasca’s detailed history of their lives, do nothing to actually improve their lives or the world around them. They cloak themselves in making good investments and restoring the glorious old house, but it’s all just really them making the same self centered, milquetoast choices that their ancestors made to get them in this situation. Rowan neither becomes unabashedly the Mayfair witch queen, neither does she defeat the ghost manipulating her family for centuries to its own end. Honestly what personally she shows in this book is stripped away in the subsequent additions.
As a teen I fell for it too! I imagined a world where I was the one who came into a massive monetary and magical inheritance, where I could be secure and powerful and independent, and maybe even loved. And the some time in my late twenties I realized the dream was to have the power TO DO NOTHING. To be important, just because. To be able to live a life self indulgent.
And that’s the intoxicating insidiousness of Anne Rice’s languid wordiness and piercing raw level of detail. Every time you read it, there’s a new horror to find. The bits that you find terrible as a teen–like the appeal of rape and justification of incest–are just the parts of the horror you can see. The bits that annoy you endlessly as a writer–my gods did no one edit this??–help the dazzling, stunning bits of writing slide down your throat before you realize they are there.
Do I recommend The Witching Hour? I don’t know! Certainly you will never read anything like elsewhere. Its WTF dazzles as well as any fourth or fifth season of a supernatural show that senses its end coming and goes all out. It, again, sure isn’t for kids. And yet, not knowing what it wants to be, slowly acknowledging that bad and evil are way too complex to dismiss as adults expect you to, and that there is so much that knowledge and power still doesn’t prepare you for, those are all classical demons we wrestle with starting in our teens. The Witching Hour isn’t a guide, but a non judgmental companion willing to walk with us for a while and smile when we discover a new thing, even if it’s horrible.
What teen doesn’t want that support?
Maybe instead of banning or restricting access to books, we need to take a good hard look at why teens are called to these stories. And consider how we can put aside our moral judgements to be that supportive shadow walking with them instead.