Review - Glen Duncan, "The Last Werewolf"

The Last Werewolf is a crazy new horror novel, packed with action, sex, and gore, but written in a semi-"old fashioned" style. The whole thing is a bit of a throwback to the literary classics of horror--Dracula, Frankenstein, and that sort--even the font type and the maroon-colored page edges evoking something written a hundred years ago. And yet the story is entirely modern, full of satirical jabs at Western culture and references to current films, TV shows, and gadgets.

Glen Duncan, a British author whose previous books I haven't yet read, has put together a pretty exciting werewolf tale here. And I don't have to tell those of you who are fans of this sub-genre that there aren't a hell of a lot of great werewolf novels out there.

Duncan's story gives us Jake Marlowe, a two-hundred-year-old werewolf preparing himself for his final days, ready to give himself up to the heads of WOCOP, an organization created in order to dispatch werewolves and other supernatural monsters. There's a rumor going around that Marlowe's the last of his kind, and the evidence is strong, considering no new werewolves have been created in years, possibly since Marlowe himself was turned in the 1840's.

The book is essentially about loneliness, despair at being one of a kind, and Marlowe's resignation to a life of loveless adventure, his only other option death, which he can't bring himself to carry out with his own hands. To say much more would, I think, give away too much of the story, which has its fair share of twists. I'm not completely sold on the chapter cliffhangers. He uses them quite frequently. On the other hand, I like short chapters, and this one's got about sixty in under three hundred pages.

Duncan is definitely an author worth following. I'm curious to see if he uses a similar writing style in his other novels, or if that was specifically for this one. Find out soon, I imagine.