New Orleans, LA

The vast majority of the novel takes place in the city of New Orleans, LA—a recurring venue for Rice's works. The haunted, vagrant nature of the city functions as a useful backdrop for the supernatural elements of the novel, but there are also respects in which those supernatural elements are in fact a manifestation of the realities of life in Louisiana (and the Deep South in general). Rice's deconstruction of the poisonous nature of tradition is in line with a Faulknerian examination of old-money Southern families and the ways in which their progeny are fractured and haunted by the loss of their patronymic greatness. The Mayfairs, once a proud family of witches, have mostly become a collection of wealthy-but-anonymous pencil-pushers, no longer endowed with their old skills and instead clinging to inheritance and legacy as justification for their continued proliferation. In this sense, the setting...