SOURCE: “Ghastly and Unnatural Ambitions,” in New York Times Book Review, November 4, 1990, p. 11.

In the following review, McGrath offers unfavorable assessment of The Witching Hour, citing weak characterization and repetitiousness as the novel's major flaws.

The evil that blights the pages of The Witching Hour, Anne Rice's new novel, has an intriguing origin. In the 1600's, in Scotland, a naïve young woman called Suzanne Mayfair learns for a lark how to summon demons. Later she's burned at the stake, but the demon she summons, Lasher by name, goes on to bedevil her descendants down to the present day, apparently seeing in them the means of fulfilling his ghastly and unnatural ambitions. In the process he turns them into a “witch family,” a witch here being “a person who can attract and manipulate unseen forces.”

But what's interesting about poor Suzanne's fate is that it's a witch judge...