This beauty (the witches always are beautiful) is accused by her mother-in-law of sleeping with Satan and murdering her husband. The execution of Comtesse Deborah Mayfair de Montcleve in September, 1689, in the town of Montcleve, France, is one such scene. This idea allows Rice to create vampires, witches and demons who can be figures that excite our compassion, most especially in their deaths. This is a concept repellent and alien to Christians, but something Hindus always have known. Renewal through destruction and regeneration through violence drive the plots of Rice’s “supernatural” novels. In “The Witching Hour,” as in her vampire chronicles, she attacks the idea that good and evil are polar opposites. Rice must be wearing the Mayfair emerald herself, since she writes with hypnotic power. At least one female per generation, the one who wears the Mayfair emerald, has exercised this power in worldly ways and has come to a tragic, mournful end. Generation after generation, since the first Mayfair woman landed on American soil after fleeing a slave insurrection in Haiti, these women have had incredible power. The multiple generations of Mayfair women in the house on First Street are strange. Rice thoroughly enjoys herself as she slides through 17th-Century France, the fetid plantations in Port-au-Prince, the pain of the Civil War South and the seeming “normalcy” of today’s San Francisco and New Orleans.
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