Last year, AMC snapped up the rights to a whole lot of Anne Rice novels, and they’re wasting no time getting two of the author’s best-known works into TV development. The network greenlit an Interview With the Vampire series—the start of an extended Vampire Chronicles universe—in June, and last week it announced that Sam Reid will play Lestat.
Now, wheels are turning for Rice’s Lives of the Mayfair Witches series. Variety reports that AMC has opened a writers’ room for the adaptation, which will “focus on an intuitive young neurosurgeon who discovers that she is the unlikely heir to a family of witches.”
The first book of the Mayfair Witches series, The Witching Hour, is a fat, somewhat daunting tome—and one of Rice’s most engrossing reads. The book’s dramatic cover copy explains:
Demonstrating once again her gift for spellbinding storytelling, Anne Rice makes real for us a great dynasty of four centuries of witches—a family given to poetry and incest, murder and philosophy, a family that over the ages is itself haunted by a powerful, dangerous, and seductive being called Lasher who haunts the Mayfair women.
Moving in time from today’s New Orleans and San Francisco to long-ago Amsterdam and the France of Louis XIV, from the coffee plantations of Port-au-Prince to Civil War New Orleans and back to today, Anne Rice has spun a mesmerizing tale that challenges everything we believe in.
First published in 1990, The Witching Hour was followed by Lasher in 1993 and Taltos in 1994. There is crossover between Rice’s Witches and Vampire series, especially in later Vampire Chronicles novels, which gives AMC plenty of material to mine for its vampiric universe.
AMC’s adaptation has two writer/executive producers on board, Esta Spaulding and Michelle Ashford (who is also writing the screenplay based on the viral short story “Cat Person”). If the show gets picked up, Spalding will be its showrunner. Her resume is light on SFF fare, but full of experience producing well-regarded dramas, including Masters of Sex and On Becoming a God in Central Florida.
No other details have been announced, but given the speed with which AMC’s moving on Interview With the Vampire, it might not be long before this one gets greenlit as well. So, who should play Rowan Mayfair?
