Lives of the Mayfair Witches

About the Lives of the Mayfair Witches series

Lives of the Mayfair Witches is Anne Rice's other major gothic saga, a doorstop trilogy tracing thirteen generations of a wealthy, cursed New Orleans family bound to Lasher, a beautiful and ancient spirit who has attached himself to the Mayfair women and shaped their fortunes -- and their deaths -- for three hundred years. The Witching Hour (1990) centers on Dr. Rowan Mayfair, a neurosurgeon raised far from the family estate who doesn't yet know she's the latest in the witches' bloodline, and unfolds as both a multigenerational family epic and a slow-building horror novel as Lasher reveals what he actually wants from her. Lasher (1993) and Taltos (1994) push the mythology into stranger territory, tying the Mayfair curse to an ancient race with its own reproductive horror, and bringing the trilogy's cosmology closer to the vampire world Rice was building in parallel.

Where the Vampire Chronicles is confessional and character-driven, the Mayfair books lean into sweeping family-saga plotting -- wills, incest, inheritance, and generations of women who can't outrun what's been done to their bloodline. Rice later folded the Mayfair witches and the Vampire Chronicles into a shared universe, with characters crossing over in later novels from both series, though the original trilogy stands as a complete, self-contained story on its own.