Taltos was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1994, concluding the Lives of the Mayfair Witches trilogy. The novel introduces Ashlar Templeton — a Taltos who has survived for millennia by hiding in plain sight, most recently as the eccentric founder of a toy company. Where Lasher was a spirit seeking incarnation, Ashlar is a fully embodied Taltos who has learned to pass as human, concealing his true nature (enormous height, eidetic memory, a lifespan measured in centuries) behind a carefully constructed persona.
The novel’s most substantial contribution to Rice’s mythology is the deep history of the Taltos species: their origin on a lost island (a mythologized version of Atlantis or Doggerland), their peaceful culture, their near-extinction at the hands of early humans who feared their strangeness, and their gradual disappearance into the margins of history. Ashlar’s narration of this history — to the Mayfair family, who need to understand what they have been entangled with — is Rice at her most world-building: she creates an entire alternative prehistory with the same obsessive specificity she brings to her depictions of New Orleans architecture or Renaissance Venice.
The convergence of the Mayfair and Taltos storylines — Ashlar’s discovery that the Mayfair bloodline carries Taltos genes, the possibility that reproduction between Mayfair women and Taltos males could revive the species — raises questions about genetic destiny, species survival, and the ethics of reproduction that the novel treats with more seriousness than its genre trappings might suggest.
Collecting Taltos
First edition (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1994): Hardcover with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $15–$40
- Very good: $8–$20