Jacob Marlowe is ready to die. After living for more than two hundred years as a werewolf, he has grown weary of the world, of its things, its people, even the ecstasy of the kill, and as a result thinks more often than not of suicide as a swift expulsion from the mortal coil, an immediate solution to his worsening loneliness and depression. Informed by his human friend Harley that he is the last of his kind after a successful hit on a fellow werewolf by WOCOP (World Organization for the Control of Occult Phenomena), Jake is content to sit back and let death finally take him, welcoming his executioners with open arms once they reach him while using the last few days he assumes he has on earth chronicling his life and experiences in a journal.
Oddly enough WOCOP, who has been offing werewolves for years, wants Jake alive...at least one of them does. Being the last, the hunt has lost its thrill for those involved and an agent named Ellis wants to cut a deal to make things more interesting on their final slaughter. Playing along for the sake of wanting nor having little else to do, Jake's proposition with Ellis becomes increasingly dubious until one lone day he makes a startling discovery that perforates the dark of his mind and sheds light on WOCOP's ulterior motives, his raison d'être promptly restored.
"The Last Werewolf", author Glen Duncan's (I, Lucifer) eighth novel, is a quick read at only 293 pages but this small and oft salacious novel is stuffed with a riveting and expeditious storyline containing equal amounts of sex and violence, a blunt yet eloquent narrator, and side characters that are both insidious and intriguing. And it isn't just werewolves who comprise the supernatural focus of the story - vampires saunter (and float) their way into the action, driving up the gore factor as well as the body count.
And speaking of gore, get ready for some gruesome descriptions of injury and death among the characters; mutilations, beheadings and dismemberment are among the profuse carnage that Duncan imparts on Jake's supercentenarian life. When he is not killing and maiming, he is either thinking about sex or engaging in it, the rise and fall of his member his central preoccupation. Either way, Jake perpetually hungers for flesh, his urges so base and primal since being bitten that it's a wonder he's not completely lost his capacity for human emotion after two centuries (he is a little stony in the first half of the book).
Critics praising Duncan's work have made allusions to Bram Stoker. Though he is every bit as engrossing and incisive as his Irish counterpart, Duncan takes Stoker's aptitude and ability to transfix one step further by imparting a brooding and biting tenor to Jake's narration, his journaling freeform (there are no entries or dates) and endowed with more personality. Duncan also has a wider vocabulary - I stumbled more than once on words I didn't know the meaning of, not to mention the occasional British slang, but for me it kept things interesting and forced me to explore the breadth and variety of the English language. The Brit in him provides sophistication and a refined delivery, one that has the reader believing that the man with the long and wild dark hair and weathered leather bomber on the book's jacket could easily converse and clink tea cups with Queen Elizabeth. But something dark and dastardly smolders beneath the layers of civility; the ideal amalgam of gentleman and rogue is something to be admired and it provides a seductive and mesmeric voice to his work.
Bottom line: Many of today's popular books that contain a supernatural platform are part of the Young Adult genre, so it's a great pleasure to find a novel that contains the same subject matter that is strictly adult and possesses an established, stylish, and incredibly charismatic voice. William Skidelsky of The Guardian has said that Duncan "specializes in writing novels that can't easily be pigeonholed". Though the subject of lycanthropy has been done many times, "The Last Werewolf" still manages to be in a category all its own.
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