You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Scan barcode
A review by bookwormlukas
The Last Werewolf by Glen Duncan
5.0
This book blew my mind.
This was a book that I had pretty low expectations for, I mean I knew nothing of the author, or the story going in, and was simply thinking this would be another in your urban fantasy type series. Oh how wrong I was. While yes, the books main subject matter is werewolves, this is a more literary take on the wolf myth, and a surprisingly touching story of loneliness.
The best thing about this book was it’s narration. It’s not often that a book can set up it’s characters and it’s overall tone within the first few pages but this is what this novel does. Our main character Jake, ‘the last werewolf’, has lived his life alone for the last 70 years and is finally beginning to ponder the idea of suicide. (In this world werewolves live for hundreds of years.) He has decided that he has nothing left to live for, and when a bounty is placed on his head by the son of one of his victims, he decides to accept it as fate and give himself up.
Then something happens. (which I won’t go into because, SPOILERS)
This was like a werewolf book written by Bret Easton Ellis, the narration was quite depressing and witty at the same time, with a sort of blunt unemotional coldness that was really evocative of Ellis’s work. I didn’t know who Glen Duncan was when I started reading this, but I will definitely be hunting out his other works now. I was actually unaware he had written ‘I, Lucifer’ which has been on my radar for quite some time now.
Another thing this novel did well was dealing with the aspect of werewolves killing people, and making something unsympathetic quite sympathetic in a way. In this world, werewolves MUST kill people during the night of the full moon to live and if they don’t they will die. This means that our main character has killed people over the years, he sees it as ‘you either give up and die, or you live with the pain and deal with it’, and weirdly, it works.
I could talk about what works in this novel for days, but I’m just going to leave it by saying that I highly recommend this book if anything I have said above has appealed to you. Overall, 5 freaking stars, oh yeah.
This was a book that I had pretty low expectations for, I mean I knew nothing of the author, or the story going in, and was simply thinking this would be another in your urban fantasy type series. Oh how wrong I was. While yes, the books main subject matter is werewolves, this is a more literary take on the wolf myth, and a surprisingly touching story of loneliness.
The best thing about this book was it’s narration. It’s not often that a book can set up it’s characters and it’s overall tone within the first few pages but this is what this novel does. Our main character Jake, ‘the last werewolf’, has lived his life alone for the last 70 years and is finally beginning to ponder the idea of suicide. (In this world werewolves live for hundreds of years.) He has decided that he has nothing left to live for, and when a bounty is placed on his head by the son of one of his victims, he decides to accept it as fate and give himself up.
Then something happens. (which I won’t go into because, SPOILERS)
This was like a werewolf book written by Bret Easton Ellis, the narration was quite depressing and witty at the same time, with a sort of blunt unemotional coldness that was really evocative of Ellis’s work. I didn’t know who Glen Duncan was when I started reading this, but I will definitely be hunting out his other works now. I was actually unaware he had written ‘I, Lucifer’ which has been on my radar for quite some time now.
Another thing this novel did well was dealing with the aspect of werewolves killing people, and making something unsympathetic quite sympathetic in a way. In this world, werewolves MUST kill people during the night of the full moon to live and if they don’t they will die. This means that our main character has killed people over the years, he sees it as ‘you either give up and die, or you live with the pain and deal with it’, and weirdly, it works.
I could talk about what works in this novel for days, but I’m just going to leave it by saying that I highly recommend this book if anything I have said above has appealed to you. Overall, 5 freaking stars, oh yeah.