SOURCE: “Son of a Witch,” in Washington Post Book World, October 9, 1994, p. 4.

In the following review, Winter offers qualified assessment of Taltos. “Certain to please the many fans of Anne Rice,” writes Winter, Taltos “is not likely to gain her any new readers.”

It seems natural that new novels by Stephen King and Anne Rice should be linked with the seemingly unavoidable word “horror.” Yet King writes from a decidedly populist perspective; he is a Faulkner by way of Jim Thompson, Don Robertson and Richard Matheson, with a lot of B movies and episodes of “Twilight Zone” and “Outer Limits” thrown in for good measure. The essence of his fiction is the disruption of everyday life by the outre: a funfair for the common man. Anne Rice, on the other hand, finds her roots in fairy tales; medieval romances and gothic novels—particularly the decadent “yellow gothics” that...