The Chronicles of the Mayfair Witches
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"Ancient Evelyn's Poem" Date of Original Parlor Publication 14 June 2008
About the Reading Order
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The three additional books that combine the Lives of the Mayfair Witches with the Vampire Chronicles are Merrick, Blackwood Farm, and Blood Canticle.
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Merrick can be read at any point as it does not directly involve the First Street Mayfairs. However, if the order is to be exact, it is between Taltos and Blackwood Farm.
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To read Blackwood Farm and Blood Canticle as part of the Vampire Chronicles, it's not really necessary to read the Lives of the Mayfair Witches first. However, to understand how Mona Mayfair came to be in a place where she crosses paths with Quinn Blackwood, reading the three books in the Lives of the Mayfair Witches explains this plot point thoroughly.
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Below is a brief synopsis of each book in the series from various sources, such as Amazon.com and Books-a-Million. The cover art in the images of each book are from the hardcover, trade paperback and mass market paperback editions. The paperback editions are shown in a tablet and a smartphone.
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One will rise who is too evil.
One will come who is too good.
'Twixt the two, a witch shall falter
and thereby open wide the door.
The Witching Hour
"The doctor woke up afraid."
~WH pg. 3, Mass Market 1993 and Amazon Kindle Editions
This short sentence opens the long and detailed Lives of the Mayfair Witches as the first sentence of the first book.
From the First Edition Dust Jacket:
The author of the extraordinary Vampire Chronicles--Interview With the Vampire, The Vampire Lestat, and The Queen of the Damned-- gives us a huge, hypnotic novel of witchcraft and the occult through four centuries.
Demonstrating, once again, her gift for spellbinding storytelling and the creation of legend, Anne Rice makes real for us a great dynasty of witches--a family given to poetry and to incest, to murder and to philosophy; a family that, over the ages, is itself haunted by a powerful, dangerous, and seductive being.
On the veranda of a great New Orleans house, now faded, a mute and fragile woman sits rocking . . . and The Witching Hour begins.
It begins in our time with a rescue at sea. Rowan Mayfair, a beautiful woman, a brilliant practitioner of neurosurgery--aware that she has special powers but unaware that she comes from an ancient line of witches--finds the drowned body of a man off the coast of California and brings him to life. He is Michael Curry, who was born in New Orleans and orphaned in childhood by fire on Christmas Eve, who pulled himself up from poverty, and who now, in his brief interval of death, has acquired a sensory power that mystifies and frightens him.
As these two, fiercely drawn to each other, fall in love and--in passionate alliance--set out to solve the mystery of her past and his unwelcome gift, the novel moves backward and forward in time from today's New Orleans and San Francisco to long-ago Amsterdam and a château in the France of Louis XIV. An intricate tale of evil unfolds--an evil unleashed in seventeenth-century Scotland, where the first "witch," Suzanne of the Mayfair, conjures up the spirit she names Lasher . . . a creation that spells her own destruction and torments each of her descendants in turn.
From the coffee plantations of Port au Prince, where the great Mayfair fortune is made and the legacy of their dark power is almost destroyed, to Civil War New Orleans, as Julien--the clan's only male to be endowed with occult powers--provides for the dynasty its foothold in America, the dark, luminous story encompasses dramas of seduction and death, episodes of tenderness and healing. And always--through peril and escape, tension and release--there swirl around us the echoes of eternal war: innocence versus the corruption of the spirit, sanity against madness, life against death. With a dreamlike power, the novel draws us, through circuitous, twilight paths, to the present and Rowan's increasingly inspired and risky moves in the merciless game that binds her to her heritage. And in New Orleans, on Christmas Eve, this strangest of family sagas is brought to its startling climax.
Pain and suffering as they stumble
Blood and fear before they learn.
Woe betide this Springtime Eden
Now the vale of those who mourn.
Another Synopsis:
Rowan Mayfair has grown up in a life of wealth and privilege in San Francisco. A neurosurgeon with an unusual gift for healing patients, Rowan knows nothing of her family, the Mayfairs of New Orleans.
Michael Curry grew up in New Orleans but moved to San Francisco after high school and never returned. A firefighter's son, he had the opportunity to go to college, then build a successful business restoring historic Victorian homes.
An accident at sea brings Rowan and Michael together. After Rowan rescues Michael from drowning in San Francisco Bay, Michael wakes up with a psychic power in his hands and an urgent mission that sends him back to New Orleans. Just as he leaves, Rowan gets a call telling her that her birth mother has died. Rowan immediately arranges to leave San Francisco for New Orleans and when she gets there, her and Michael's destinies merge in one gloomy old mansion and a ghost that has haunted the Mayfair family for over 300 years.
From the Parlor's Copies:
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 91-91905
ISBN: 0-345-38446-6
eISBN: 978-0-307-57595-1
Beware the watchers in that hour
Bar the doctors from the house
Scholars will but nourish evil
Scientists would raise it high.
Lasher
From the First Edition Dust Jacket:
From the day her first Vampire Chronicle was published, critics and readers--readers by the hundreds of thousands--have been mesmerized by the writings of Anne Rice. And with the publication of The Witching Hour, she created for us yet another world and legend, and both the chorus of praise and the multitudes of her readers once more increased.
Now, Anne Rice brings us again--even more magically--into the midst of the dynasty of witches she introduced in The Witching Hour.
At the center: the brilliant and beautiful Rowan Mayfair, queen of the coven, and Lasher, the darkly compelling demon whom she finds irresistible and from whose evil spell and vision she must now flee. She takes with her their terrifying and exquisite child, one of "a brood of children born knowing, able to stand and talk on the first day."
Rowan's attempt to escape Lasher and his pursuit of her and their child are at the heart of this extraordinary saga. It is a novel that moves around the globe, backward and forward through time, and between the human and demonic worlds. Its many voices--of women, of men, of demons and angels, present and past--haunt and enchant us. With a dreamlike power, the novel draws us through twilight paths, telling a chillingly hypnotic story of occult and spiritual aspirations and passion.
Let the devil speak his story
Let him rouse the angel's might
Make the dead come back to witness
Put the alchemist to flight.
Another Synopsis:Lasher, the ghost that has haunted the Mayfair family for thirteen generations, has been born in the flesh to Rowan Mayfair. With Rowan as his captive, Lasher manages to stay several steps ahead of the massive international manhunt initiated by the powerful Mayfair family.
As the investigation continues, Mayfair women are dying of a strange hemorrhage due to miscarriage of an embryo that might not even be human. Genetic testing is quickly revealing that many members of the Mayfair family possess an extra set of chromosomes that lie dormant unless two people with the extra set of chromosomes reproduce.
As more and more evidence of a possibly heretofore unknown species emerges, including samples sent in secret by Rowan herself, trouble brews in the Talamasca that makes things dangerous for those members already involved with the Mayfair family.
On top of that, massive funds from the Mayfair accounts are being withdrawn, and as it becomes clear that Rowan's signature was forged on more than one occasion, and as reports come in of Rowan's declining health, and with more and more women dying, it becomes a matter of extreme urgency that Rowan be found...and that Lasher be stopped.
From the Parlor's Copies:
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 93-12246
ISBN: 0-345-39781-9
eISBN: 978-0-307-57586-9
Slay the flesh that is not human
Trust to weapons crude and cruel
For, dying on the verge of wisdom,
Tortured souls may seek the light.
Taltos
From the First Edition Dust Jacket:
The legend-building storytelling power that has won Anne Rice her millions of devoted readers is enthrallingly present in Taltos . Her new novel continues the epic of the Mayfair witches, the hypnotic saga of the occult that began with The Witching Hour and Lasher.
Meet Mr. Ash, quiet-spoken, tall, unfailingly kind--sole survivor of an ancient species, the Taltos--thriving among humankind as he has always done, now the head of a great corporate empire. As the novel opens, he stunned to learn from an old and mysterious friend that another Taltos has been seen--in the very same Scottish glen where centuries ago, long before the coming of the Romans, Ash ruled his clan.
At once he is propelled into the world of Rowan Mayfair, and into the mysteries of the Mayfair family--the New Orleans dynasty of witches forever besieged by ghosts, spirits, and the dizzying power of his own species--a family intimately involved with the heritage of the Taltos, a family of unique, brilliant, and troubled souls struggling as they have for centuries to use both science and magic in their battle for greatness, even survival.
At the heart of the novel is the Talamasca, a secular order of psychic scholars, the only organization in existence which may understand Ash, his Taltos past, and the dilemma of the Mayfair witches.
The story of the Mayfair family continues, moving from London to Donnelaith, Scotland, to New Orleans, back and forth through time--from the origins of the Taltos and their mythic Lost Land to the moral crises of the present day.
In a swirling universe filled with death and life, corruption and innocence, the novel takes us on a wondrous journey back through the centuries to a civilization half human, of wholly mysterious origin, at odds with mortality and immortality, justice and guilt. Once again Anne Rice has created new worlds, brilliantly imagined; she holds us mesmerized and enchanted.
Crush the babes who are not children
Show no mercy to the pure
Else shall Eden have no Springtime.
Else shall our kind reign no more.
Another Synopsis:
Lasher is dead; Rowan is alive and healing slowly. A tentative peace has been restored to the Mayfair family, until Talamasca scholar and Mayfair bridegroom Aaron Lightner is murdered by a hit-and-run motorist. This causes Rowan to immediately come out of her state of catatonic grief, and initiate a search for the persons responsible for Aaron Lightner's death.
Before Rowan and Michael leave for London, it is discovered that Mona Mayfair, the 13-year-old Designee of the Mayfair Legacy upon Rowan's death, is pregnant. Mona had seduced Michael during Rowan's captivity with Lasher, and it looks like Mona is Michael's last chance to have children.
As Mona's pregnancy progresses at an alarmingly fast rate, Rowan and Michael close in on Aaron's killers. They meet Ash Templeton, who aides Rowan and Michael on their quest to get to the bottom of the unrest in the Talamasca and avenge Aaron. Ash then tells them the long and violent history of the Taltos, all the while keeping it secret from them that he knows who Mona is...
From the Parlor's Copies:
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 95-96245
ISBN: 0-345-39471-2
eISBN: 978-0-307-57592-0
Ancient Evelyn's Poem
Rice, Anne. Lasher (Lives of Mayfair Witches Book 2) (pp. 417-418). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
This is the poem that Evelyn recited to Julien, fortelling the coming through of Lasher and of disaster ahead...
I do not recall where I learned this, but I had read once that Stan Rice had written this poem for the book Lasher. If this is so, then this is a superb example of his prowess as a poet. It is a darkly beautiful poem about real people in real chaos.
Despite a witch's inability to control the future, this poem demonstrates that, with the power to see, it is possible to see signs of it. Those signs will not tell you in exact detail what you must do when the hour arrives, but you will have some knowledge that the hour was coming. Evelyn was clearly strong enough to envision such a poem and to recite it to the one person determined to remain after death to continue to fight Lasher and stop him from achieving his diabolical goal.
Even in our most mundane, trouble-toiled lives, there is still that connection to the spiritual and ethereal that does not necessarily transport us, but informs us and broadens our understanding of our world. Poetry conveys a great deal of ideas and emotions in a short amount of well-chosen words and expressions and makes us ponder the true state of our existence. Poetry makes us think. It sharpens our minds, broadens our outlooks and enriches our spirits.
This simple yet eloquent poem sums up the story of the Mayfair Witches and advises Michael as to what he must consider if he is to defeat Lasher. Again, it provokes Michael's thoughts, even if it does not spell out exactly how the end is to come. It is intended as a help if not a set of explicit instructions. Poetry never worked that way.
Michael understands. Michael knows, somewhere in his mind, what must be done. However, he knows not how the circumstances will be set up or how exactly he will do what he must do.
