Julien, "the genial dandy who can be in two places at once and start fires with his mind" and who "movingly recalls his male lovers"; Stella, "the flapper, wildly dancing the Charleston, the witch who just wants to have fun"; her granddaughter Deirdre, "whose sexual passion for Lasher is so intense that terrible old Aunt Carlotta keeps her doped to the eyeballs on Thorazine all her adult life"; and Mona, the "young feminist witch with sharklike business instincts" who has also been described as Rowan's "13-year-old sexpot niece ... who is herself the most powerful witch of the Mayfair clan." Red haired, green eyed Mona is the "ascendant character" of Taltos. The novel also introduces Ashlar, an ancient Taltos living in New York, whom Theroux described as a "mild seven-foot mysterioso who ... fears flying, has no soul and has a white streak of hair coming from his left temple, [and] has a brain twice the size of that of a human." Having not seen another of his kind in centuries, Ashlar is "driven essentially to the job of revealing the riddle of not only who and what he is but what he wants." Works The Witching Hour (1990) The Witching Hour is the first novel in Rice's Lives of the Mayfair Witches trilogy. It was published by Knopf in 1990. The Mayfairs' First Street house is based on Rice's own antebellum mansion in New Orleans, with fictional events written as if taking place in specific locations in the real-world house. Rice bought the mansion with the advance for The Witching Hour. She called The Witching Hour "a Gothic epic", and said, "The Turn of the Screw is a wonderful haunting novel [but it is] just the beginning. I want The Witching Hour to be as great or greater than Henry James." Plot Dr. Rowan Mayfair is a gifted neurosurgeon in San Francisco, California. When her estranged birth mother Deirdre Mayfair dies in New Orleans, she begins to learn about the old Southern family to which she belongs. Michael Curry is a contractor who specializes in the restoration of old homes while dreaming of his childhood in New Orleans and yearning to return there. Rowan gradually realizes that she has the psychic power to either save or take lives. Michael drowns but she revives him, the near-death experience triggering a new and unwanted clairvoyant ability within him. Michael and Rowan