Monday 19 September 2011

49/111 – The Last Werewolf by Glen Duncan

Okay, this is my last of the recent Canongate purchases. Maybe I ought to stop buying books based on who they’re published by? Try something new for a change? Who knows.

I quite liked this, apart from the ending, however I thought that the writing was excellent and pretty stunning throughout. The story is about a man called Jake, who is a werewolf. It’s set in a world pretty similar to ours, except that there’s an organisation who set out to eliminate occult phenomena from the planet, like an FBI or something similar. Jake is the last werewolf left on the planet, and is being hunted down by a man with a grudge against him for eating his father.

Jake’s mood at the beginning of the story changes pretty dramatically from being pretty much ready to give up and die, to being desperate to stay alive. The reason being that he meets a lady wolf, who no one knew existed. I’m totally going to give away the ending of the book now because it pissed me off quite a bit, but they fall in love and then get separated by the baddies, and she is captured. Werewolves are supposed to be infertile but oh my gosh she manages to get pregnant, and not only that, but Jake dies at the end, leaving her all mournful and Linda-Hamilton-in-Terminator-2-esque.

I despise endings like this because they seem like such a cliché and such a lame way to end what had up until that point been a pretty awesome story. So lame!

But before that, it was pretty great. I’m not at all a fan of all the chick-lit fantasy shit floating around at the moment, and this was clearly something from a different area of the genre altogether. It did have a romance element to it, but it wasn’t girly or overly romantic. Mostly it included a lot of sex and some sweet, sweet murder, which is fine with me. I don’t have much else to say about it right now because I’m running late, but I imagine there’ll probably be a sequel, and I was suitably entertained that I’d read the next one in the series. Even though I hated the ending of this book, the writing was really something special, which usually isn’t enough to keep me going, but on this occasion, I’ll make an exception.

Next: Wilson by Daniel Clowes

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