Glen Duncan (1) (1965–)

The writer is a sadist and his book is horrible. You really must read it. So says the blurb on the front and so you are forewarned that this is not going to be an easy one to read even by Glen Duncan's standards. Nick and Chloe are the perfect young couple. Almost from the moment they meet they know they will spend the rest of their lives together. Yet the story begins with Nicholas in an almost catatonic state fleeing to New York, alone and seeking numbness in a bar described as the place show more drunks go to die. The preceding six years of his life with Chloe are described in flashback while being interspersed with momentary glimpses of his current time falling prey to the debauchery of wealthy heiress Mickey and her cronies and meeting fellow barfly and expat Lancelot. It's not until halfway through the book that we get to the event that changed everything. Not just an infidelity that could possibly be worked around but something much more brutal that leaves Chloe in hospital and near death and sets Nick on his downward spiral.

The first part of the book deals with an idyllic relationship where nothing matters but each other, mostly seen from Nick's perspective. The second half then shifts more towards Chloe as she has to find a way of dealing with what happened and Nick's subsequent abandonment. This is probably the darkest in tone of the books I've read from this author and there were times that I could have been reading it that I didn't feel like picking it up again and although less than 300 pages in length it took a while to reach the end. Does that mean it's a bad book? No! Just not a light and fluffy one. show less

1. This book really really wants you to know that werewolves Fuck. Werewolves are just big fuckmurder machines. I am capitalizing this because I don't know how else to convey the intensity with which this book needs you to know that werewolves, well, They Fuck. The book jacket/blurbs use the word "sexy" to describe this book quite a lot. It is not sexy, it merely involves a lot of sex. Particularly because much of the sex in the first two-thirds of the book is specifically with women the show more narrator dislikes, or is, at best, totally personally uninterested in.

2. I'm rating this book two stars instead of one for a few reasons, but it was a close thing. The first is that the lowest you can rate something on Goodreads, in my understanding, is one star, and this book is definitely better than the other bad longish werewolf urban fantasy novel that I've read, Martin Millar's Lonely Werewolf Girl, which was dramatically more sexist and also written much more poorly than The Last Werewolf. This doesn't mean that The Last Werewolf is either not sexist nor sometimes not-very-well-written, however. At one point, early on, the narrator specifies that he is not, in fact, a misogynist, and then gives the example of the fact that he goes down on the escort he hires. This is, of course, a joke, but there's something telling about it. Especially the way Duncan talks about the female characters' bodies (here the Horny Werewolf narrator seems mostly like Duncan really wanted a way to talk about lithe tits and soft anuses and call it literary*), or the fact that the first sentence in a woman's POV is "No one raped me," which hits exactly that King-Rat-style trying to be aware of rape culture and structural misogyny and just--missing it.

3. The thing about this book is that it wobbles so close to the exact kind of bad monster (especially bad werewolf) fiction that I adore. This is probably part of why I did finish the entire novel, and there were parts that made me laugh out loud (in genuine enjoyment). There's moments that, like, in their ridiculousness but also excellence, reminded me of, like, Teen Wolf (the TV show, not the homophobic eighties movie with Marty Mcfly or whatever) or The Vampire Lestat. It has a similar willingness to just go for the full over-the-top narrative. Like, there's werewolves, and vampires, and they do hate each other a lot for some sort of instinctual species reason, and there's an elaborate werewolf hunting organization that requires a lot of bullshit spy tactics to evade, and possibly my favorite character of the entire book, Ellis, a werewolf hunter with waist length blond hair and a sort of philosophical hippy aura, a sort of classically-mad-king Luna Lovegood. Like, that's excellent. There's a bit where the main character is just sort of carrying around a sad French former male model who keeps trying to kill him very incompetently because his girlfriend just dumped him (he is, notably, on quite a lot of cocaine for most of this). The ex-model made a silver-tipped javelin to kill the werewolf with. It has his name and his ex-girlfriend's on it in "angelic script." I have no idea what that is. At one point the werewolf and the model are just sitting in the woods, both having injured each other quite a bit, doing cocaine (the model), smoking cigarettes (the werewolf), and eating cashews (the model again).

4. The ending was, genuinely, very good. The switching perspectives was, apart from my complaint above, largely done well, and the sort of bait-and-switch move from the title to the end was clever, and I only suspected it was going to happen a few chapters before it did. It made me want to read the sequel, a little bit--I really like Tallula. But I don't think I'm going to.
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*I want to be clear, I am not automatically opposed to literature involving significant discussion of tits and anuses, though I feel like I might be done with the word "lithe." I think we could all use a "lithe" moratorium for a while. show less

The Last Werewolf by Glen Duncan is a roller coaster ride of violence, romance, action and adventure. While outlining the protocols, manners and habits of the werewolf, Duncan delivers a story of a 200 year old werewolf, weary of it all and ready to die, until he is given a reason to fight for his survival.

Relying on many of the tried and true myths of werewolf-vampire hostility, wooden stakes, silver bullets, and the lure of the full moon, the author also adds an erotic earthiness that some show more may find offensive but I felt helped to pull the reader into Jake’s lonely, persecuted life. A killer that isn’t always comfortable in the role that nature has given him, Jake journals his life in a wry and cynical manner and adds touches of philosophical musings on the nature of his existence.

This is a page turner that will have the reader laughing at one moment, being grossed out the next, and at times actually feeling empathy for this strange, angst-ridden creature. Raw, visceral, and erotic, this will not be a book for everyone, but I thoroughly enjoyed it’s original, adult take on the werewolf legend. show less

Well, no one is more surprised about me liking TALULLA RISING than I am. THE LAST WEREWOLF may top the list of books I've read recently that I thoroughly disliked, but I had been sent an eBook copy of the follow up, and thought I'd at least read the first couple of chapters to see if it was still as bad, IMO, as the first book. Jump ahead 3 hours later, and I hadn't put it down yet, and then finished it today. It's like TALULLA RISING is written by a completely different man. Different show more storytelling technique; different pacing; different everything to me.

SPOILERS!

I think what really did it for me was the fact that Jake was just sitting around, waiting to die in the first book, and in this book, Talulla actually has a purpose in trying to rescue her children. Her life has meaning, whereas by the time Jake meets her in his book and has meaning in his life again, I just didn't care if he lived or died. I'd spent so much time in the first book just slogging through him whining and whining and whining about being old, not caring, blah blah blah, that I didn't care for him. At all. I know I probably should have felt for him and his plight, but I didn't.

The action is fairly non stop in this book. It picks up roughly 9 months after THE LAST WEREWOLF, and Talulla and Cloquet have hidden themselves away in Alaska, waiting for the birth of her child. The vampires discover their hideout and attack, only to have Talulla go into labor, where they subdue her and take her newly born son right from her. However, the vampires escape before they realize there are two children, and Zoe is born shortly after. What follows is a whirlwind adventure across the globe as Talulla tries to rescue her son from the vampires and the Helios project.

I now have to take back what I said about Glen Duncan's writing before. I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and if there is a follow up to this story, I'm sure I'll be picking it up. I know this is quite a reversal of attitude, but that's the amazing thing about books; they can reform your mind and opinions constantly, and that's why I love reading. show less