In their cellular prison my devoured dead roused. (A consequence of eating people: the ingested crave company. Every new victim adds a voice to the monthly chorus.) [p. 127]
I have owned this book for over a decade. I'm not sure why the time has never been right for it ...
Jake Marlowe is, as he discovers in the opening pages of this novel, the last surviving werewolf. WOCOP -- the World Organisation for the Control of Occult Phenomena -- are very good at wiping out supernatural creatures, though there still seem to be a plethora of vampires around. There are, to Jake's dismay, no female werewolves to be found. Additionally, it's a hundred years since any werewolf-victim turned werewolf in the traditional manner. Allegedly this is due to a virus, but Jake is suspicious.
Mostly, though, he is tired of life. 'I just don’t want, I really can’t take (in both senses of the verb) any more life.' He's pretty much ready to let WOCOP, in the person of their werewolf specialist Grainer, take him out with a silver bullet at the next full moon. (He did eat Grainer's father.) But then matters complicate themselves, and Jake realises there might yet be good reasons to live ... and new dangers to face.
The Last Werewolf is full of literary references and nihilistic philosophy. It's often very funny, and frequently gets down and dirty in the most animalistic, physical kinds of ways. It felt weirdly like a supernatural romance aimed at young men. (Though I do like the Washington Post's description of it as 'James Bond with dog breath'.) Jake is an engaging narrator, accepting but regretting his lupine appetites ('Two nights ago I'd eaten a forty-three-year-old hedge fund specialist. I've been in a phase of taking the ones no one wants...') and gruesomely precise about the physical manifestations of the Curse. Duncan's prose is powerful and evocative, and Jake's intelligence and erudition are a nice contrast to the scenes where he devours his prey. There's quite a lot of explicit, dirty sex, and plenty of violence: but that's not all there is to Jake.
For a number of reasons I am hesitant about reading the other two books in the series, but it's possible that sooner or later I will return to Duncan's books.
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