Last year a novel was published that blew me away. The Last Werewolf by Glen Duncan is by far one of the best books I read last year. In fact since reading the book I’ve found that Duncan is rapidly becoming one of my favourite contemporary writers. Duncan writes so engagingly that I found myself just being swept effortlessly along with the story. His style is far from minimalist though, he writes in a kind of literary way but somehow uses this to make his prose more accessible than alienating.
The story focuses on Jacob Marlow, the last of his kind after the rest have been wiped out by their antagonistic organisation WOCOP (World Organisation for the Control of Occult Phenomena). Written from Jacob’s point of view in the form of a journal we find a man tired of living life as a werewolf for over two centuries, preparing to stop running and hand himself in to WOCOP. After so long Jacob feels that life has no more meaning and he views death as something that will be a welcome relief. But things never run smoothly, do they?
This is a tale of life, love, sex, death, introspection but with a more than healthy dose of comedy and action. Duncan himself has said that there is an influence from the classic movie An American Werewolf in London that he wasn’t aware he was drawing from until about three quarters of the way through so if you take that into consideration you’ll be able to gauge an idea of how good this book is. Then end of the book left me wanting more and I was over the moon (a full one at that) to hear that Duncan is making this a trilogy and the second part is due out soon.
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