The Queen of Darkness : THE WITCHING HOUR <i> By Anne Rice (Alfred A. Knopf: $22.95; 965 pp.) </i>

“The Witching Hour” unfolds like a poisonous lotus blossom redolent with luxurious evil. Or so it would seem to a Medieval or “born -again” Christian. For those Christians and non-Christians not fearful of stories about unearthly powers, witches and secular resurrections, this novel will delight the senses.

Author Anne Rice uses her beloved New Orleans to good effect. Of all American cities, it is the least Puritan and the most resistant to English priggishness.

Michael Curry, the primary male character and an impoverished native of this delicious city, dies and is brought back to life by Rowan Mayfair, a woman of science who happens to have magical powers. However, the price of resurrection comes very high, and Michael is drawn into an ancient web spun for more than three centuries by a dynasty of witches and a demon named Lasher--souls, undead, yet not alive either. They need Michael and Rowan for their purposes.

Rice thoroughly enjoys herself as she slides through 17th-Century France, the fetid plantations in Port-au-Prince, the pain of the Civil War South and the seeming “normalcy” of today’s San Francisco and New Orleans.

The multiple generations of Mayfair women in the house on First Street are strange. Generation after generation, since the first Mayfair woman landed on American soil after fleeing a slave insurrection in Haiti, these women have had incredible power. At least one female per generation, the one who wears the Mayfair emerald, has exercised this power in worldly ways and has come to a tragic, mournful end.

Rice must be wearing the Mayfair emerald herself, since she writes with hypnotic power. In “The Witching Hour,” as in her vampire chronicles, she attacks the idea that good and evil are polar opposites. Renewal through destruction and regeneration through violence drive the plots of Rice’s “supernatural” novels. This is a concept repellent and alien to Christians, but something Hindus always have known. This idea allows Rice to create vampires, witches and demons who can be figures that excite our compassion, most especially in their deaths.

The execution of Comtesse Deborah Mayfair de Montcleve in September, 1689, in the town of Montcleve, France, is one such scene. This beauty (the witches always are beautiful) is accused by her mother-in-law of sleeping with Satan and murdering her husband. The doomed Deborah at least enjoys melancholy exaltation as she destroys her accusers by unleashing a storm upon their heads.

It’s a scene that satisfies emotionally because the “bad guys” die. In the hands of a less-skilled writer that’s all this scene would have accomplished, but Rice uses it to spur on a witness to this disaster, a former lover of Deborah’s, one Petyr van Abel. A student of witchcraft, he follows Deborah’s 20-year-old daughter Charlotte ( his daughter as it happens) to Port-au-Prince, where she flees to escape a charge of witchcraft against herself.

Conveniently, Abel keeps a file on the Mayfair witches, which he sends to his comrades in the Talamasca, an order formed in the 14th Century for the study of the supernatural and whose members often possessed supernatural powers themselves--white witches, if you will.

Breaking up the time sequence of a novel always is a risky device. Using epistles to advance the story is another volatile invention, because if the reader does not like the first-person voice of the letter the thread is broken. To Rice’s credit, she makes the epistolary interruption work. The fact that the letters are packed with sexual scrimmages (and incest, no less) helps. Americans can swallow anything if sex is the lure.

What we’re asked to swallow is a fascinating look at our ability to change ourselves and those around us: Just how much free will do we really have? And, are there intelligent spirits who share the Earth with us?

What we can’t explain, we declare irrational or evil. What we can’t understand, we dismiss. What we can’t control, we kill. And when we kill, we assign evil to our victims, goodness to ourselves. Our victims can be Jews, homosexuals, African-Americans; fill in the blanks. They are in some way seen as bad, as devils, as subhuman or superhuman; either extreme is frightening.

The Devil in Western thought really represents responsibility. Polarizing human behavior into a flat struggle between God and the Devil, good and evil, is an elaborate rationalization for our infantilism, for the refusal to take responsibility for our actions.

What makes Rice so fascinating is her obsession with this theme and her great good sense never to discuss it in terms of nonfiction. It’s hard to imagine a Protestant writing in her ornate style. Her cherubims and seraphims of lust, her incubi of desire, seem as gilded and sensual as baroque cathedrals, buildings of exquisite sensuality dedicated to eradicating that same sensuality in the flesh.

When she brings the story to our century, she uses a frail child, Deirdre Mayfair, to confess to Father Mattingly that she sees a tall, dark, handsome man. Years later this disturbed woman gives birth to an illegitimate child who is packed away to California. This daughter, Rowan, has inherited all the unholy power of the Mayfair women, although she knows nothing of Deborah Montcleve’s death in 1689, the New Orleans coven, the stories about her great-grandmother as a voodoo queen, who had a purse of gold wherein each spent coin returned to the purse by nightfall. But Rowan suffers premonitions--or are they ancestral memories? When she revives Michael and falls in love with him, she is drawn back to her ancestors, back to the sweltering secrets of the centuries, of the demon and the witches.

As the novel hurtles toward its conclusion, all of the characters from the various epochs begin to interweave. There is even a character named Rita Mae, which this reviewer found quite gratifying. Each character, sharply drawn, has a card to play, a card that must be thrown at exactly the right time for someone to hit the zygotic jackpot.

For that’s what this novel is really about: putting flesh around our dreams, flesh around our fears.

As Michael Curry, the hero, sits alone re-reading “Great Expectations” or writing to make sense of his insane, or unsane, experiences with the witches, he calms the reader, a necessary medication for this most uncalming book.

He says near the end: “Life must be founded upon the infinite possibility for choice and accident. And if we cannot prove that it is, we must believe that it is. We must believe that we can change, that we can control, that we can direct our own destinies.”

It is questionable whether Curry had a snowball’s chance in hell of directing his own destiny, but you can. Run right out to the bookstore and buy “The Witching Hour.” Rice has written her best novel yet. But I warn you: There’s the Devil to pay.