Originally published in Scotland on Sunday, 1 May 2011.
Jake Marlowe is a werewolf. In fact, when we first meet him, he’s just learned that he’s officially the last werewolf on the planet, thanks to both the genocidal work of the World Organisation for the Control of Occult Phenomena (WOCOP) and the mysterious fact that, for more than a century, no human has survived being ‘turned’ into a werewolf.
Unusually, the nihilistic Marlowe — already more than 200 years old, so essentially in werewolf middle age — initially has no plans to avoid being hunted down by chief WOCOP operative Grainer. Despite the best efforts of his aging “human familiar”, Harley, Marlowe “just doesn’t want any more life”; he’s content to simply wait out the days until the next full moon when Grainer will hunt him down.
But it soon becomes apparent that others — the great Vampire families based in the US, jilted lovers and rogue WOCOP agents — have their own plans for the world’s last werewolf, and our melancholic protagonist soon finds himself in a world-crossing thriller complete with kidnappings, exotic femme fatales and helicopter attacks on secluded mansions.
In outline, this might seem suspiciously like reasonably standard genre fare. Werewolves and vampires may be genuinely mythic figures, their origins lost in the depths of human prehistory, but they’ve seldom ever been the source of literary or artistic respectability. So, in a horror genre increasingly dominated by the sickly teen “dark romance” of Stephenie Meyer and her ilk, you might well wonder what a praised literary novelist like Glen Duncan is doing writing about werewolves and vampires?
He’s having fun, for starters; clearly a horror film fan, Duncan genuinely revels in the iconic conventions — the man-to-wolf transformations, the vicious kills, the overt libido. He also enjoys adding some much-needed literary and cultural depth to the proceedings — Marlowe is a deliberately well-read, learned individual, so this is a novel replete with cultural references, ranging from Sigmund Freud’s Essentials of Psycho-analysisto a delightful Charlotte Bronte homage — “Reader, I ate him.”
But Duncan also recognises and shows us the werewolf’s true symbolic power, not simply as a generic metaphor for male lust or innate animal instincts, but of individual self-understanding: “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,” says Marlowe at one point. “The power of naming, as old as Adam.”
This is The Last Werewolf’s real literary strength; behind the spume of the supernatural horror and action-thriller, it’s an engaging story of one man’s evolving perspective on his own nature, that offers us an ultimately life-affirming shift from despondency and contrition and to celebration.
© paulfcockburn
