the last werewolf

So I finished another book. I know, amazing! One of the perks of having my parents visit us is that I usually get a little time to myself. When my mom took Stella to the park on Thursday I started Glen Duncan's The Last Werewolf. 

Before I launch into how much I LOVED this book (LOVED IT!) I'll preface by stating that this book isn't for everyone. First, it's about a 200-year-old werewolf. So, you know, if you're not into werewolves or vampires (I myself am not big fan of the occult) you might not be inclined to fully appreciate this book. Second, it's gory and at times raunchy, as you might expect from a book about a flesh and guts (human) eating, horny werewolf.

The premise is Jake Marlowe (possibly a nod to the other Marlowe, creator of Doctor Faustus?) finds out he's the last werewolf on earth, the last of his brutal kind. He is lonely without a She, and now alone in a world with filled folks seeking to destroy him. With no real reason or desire left to live he contemplates suicide.

This is a gothically dark but deeply funny, strangely sexy (werewolf coitus), beautifully written book. I flagged half a dozen pages with paragraphs of luminous prose. Like this:

One develops an instinct for letting silence do the heavy lifting. In the three, four, five seconds that passed without either of us speaking, the many ways the conversation could go came and went like time-lapse film of flowers blooming and dying. When it was over all the relevant information was in. Parodoxically, it renewed our licence to pretend.

And this:

Iowa. Nebraska. Wyoming. Utah. Those unritzy states of seared openness, giant arenas for the colossal geometry of light and weather. Here the main performance is still planetary, a lumbering introspective working-out of masses and pressures yielding huge accidents of beauty: thunderheads like floating anvils; a sudden blizzard. Geological time, it dawns on you, is still going on.