Glen Duncan’s new novel The Last Werewolf is sophisticated and horrifying and elegant and not for Young Adult readers, who would need a thesaurus, a history tutor and sedation.
I confess a bias against werewolves and vampires: They’re popular, and children no longer know they’re supposed to be bad. So when a friend told me I had to read The Last Werewolf by Glen Duncan I rolled my eyes toward the moon. But my friend is a pusher—could sell dog food to a cat person—so I began to read. I savored every chapter; there is meat in these sentences, specifically brains. Here’s the tired-of-it-all, 200-year-old werewolf Jake Marlowe on life:
If, then… If, then… This, aside from the business of monthly transformation, the inestimable drag of Being a Werewolf, is what I’m sick of, the endless logistics. There’s a reason humans peg-out around eighty: prose fatigue. It looks like organ failure or cancer or stroke, but it’s really just the inability to carry on clambering through the assault course of mundane cause and effect. If we ask Sheila then we can’t ask Ron. If I have the kippers now then it’s quiche for tea. Four score years are about all the ifs and thens you can take. Dementia’s the sane realisation you just can’t be doing with all that anymore.
[Jake tosses his cigarette and comments on the winter scene in front of him]: Outside Flamingo two hotdog-eating bouncers in Cossack hats presided over a line of shivering clubbers. Nothing like the blood and meat of the young. You can taste the audacity of hope.
His prose talent is relentless in serving to advance the plot, but what hooked me are the one-off sentences that beguile through thought or visual awakenings:
The moonlight was on me like an angel and the constellations came down to me in tenderness: Pegasus, Ursa Major, Cygnus, Orion, the Pleiades…
Falling in love makes the unknown known. Falling out of love reverses the process…
Every Hollywood movie now is part of the index of Western exhaustion…
The author Glen Duncan is British, and with a globe-trotting main character 200-years old he’s able to comment on 200 years of European and U.S. history and popular culture from a modern point of view. The last werewolf is Jake Marlowe, and his best friend is Harley, who is 70 and part of the club that tries to keep Jake’s kind from extinction (ever since the post-war Nazi revelations about occultism led to organized werewolf hunts). Harley used to be called Buffalo Bill by his Save the Werewolves colleagues, but now these young men only know Buffalo Bill as the serial killer from The Silence of the Lambs.
There is wit, existential meditations, nerd-like genre references, sex, and a thrill-ride. Jake the werewolf is sexy and on the run, while maintaining a diet high in animal protein. He is tired of living, has contemplated suicide. There are assassins on his tail. Others, equally dangerous, also track him and kill whatever is in their path to keep him alive.
The werewolf legend is thousands of years old. I’ve read that it died as a true popular belief with Darwin’s publication of The Origin of Species—for people were persuaded of the ape-to-man path and so dismissed the werewolf as a falsehood (instead people turned a wary eye toward rumors of scary humanoids such as Big Foot). In The Last Werewolf, Duncan has his main character comment that “he was in Europe when Darwin and Nietzsche between them got rid of God, and in the United States when Wall Street reduced the American Dream to a broken suitcase and a worn-out shoe.”
Even in his man-stage some wolf remains: Jake’s hunger to taste people, a feeling of kinship to foxes and heightened senses that devour bliss. Jake Marlowe loves a woman. He thinks about God and wonders what is worse: the Almighty’s condemnation of himself or if instead there is a slab of silence the size of the universe.
Vampires show up. As immortals they don’t act swiftly—what’s a few decades if you can live forever simply by avoiding daylight and a stake in the heart—and they are nearly too late for what they want from the werewolf. The last werewolf has something the vampires covet, because immortality and flight and strength are in the end not enough. The vampires are not gentle in their pursuit.
There are lurid, squirm-inducing descriptions of the wolf transformation and the killings and feedings. Other sentences arrest with their beauty. There is the tossing off of jokes, references to works of art and literature, a speculation that if this were Buffy there would be a wolf bar and plenty of She-Wolves. The recitation of the logistics and practicalities of living as a werewolf are fascinating. The author had to work out a world of multigenerational finances, stealth, documents and social continuity—at one point having Jake Marlowe become his own son.
The vampires chase the last werewolf to the United States. “Fear of pursuit grew in inverse proportion to evidence of pursuit. The back of my head and neck developed a blind hypersensitivity. I got eye ache from repeatedly checking the rearview. Abnormal scrutiny of every desk clerk and chambermaid and store manager and waitress. The world was vampire or WOCOP (World Organisation for the Control of Occult Phenomena) until proven innocent.”
The morality/amorality of the last werewolf is a prominent theme. We follow the path of Jake Marlowe’s life and his thousand-plus kills, as Jake Marlowe himself reflects on his life’s meaning and its wretchedness:“You can’t live if you can’t accept what you are, and you can’t accept what you are if you can’t say what you do. The power of naming, as old as Adam.”
The last werewolf, driven by the Hunger of the Curse that cycles with the full moon, is also driven by his wish to understand his kind, to discover the story of how werewolves came to be. The last werewolf is ready to devour what he must to live long enough to consume the knowledge of what it means to be a werewolf. There is something in Jake’s drive that mirrors the reader’s, everyone is turning a page.
Gripping suspense—with more reversals than simply man-wolf-man—plus bloody terror and it’s funny. You will howl. How magnificent is that?
