The Last Werewolf

Glen Duncan’s Bloodlines Trilogy is a literary take on the werewolf mythos that opens with The Last Werewolf. Published in 2011, the novel follows the last werewolf left on earth as he is hunted by a group of monster hunters and by mafia-like vampires who see him as a potentially significant medical research subject. Vicious, sexually gluttonous, and self-loathing, the werewolf is ready to die until he meets an ostensibly mythical creature—a female werewolf—and falls madly in love.

The novel is allusive and complex, as the protagonist constantly makes comparisons to literary classics such as Nabokov’s Lolita, Bronte’s Jane Eyre, and Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Critics praise Duncan’s rich and evocative language, which elevates the novel’s explicit and extremely graphic gore and sexuality. Through his world-weary protagonist, Duncan explores the themes of death, progress, barbarism, redemption, animalism, sex, and love from the perspective of a non-human outsider. The novel has been rebuked for its treatment of female characters, who exist as sexual objects, typically having no agency or personality outside of their sex appeal.

Jake Marlowe is a jaded, foul-mouthed, two-hundred-year-old werewolf who doesn’t look any older than his age when he was turned tragically in the nineteenth century. The novel starts with his diary, chronicling what it has been like to exist as a good-looking monster with a monthly need to torture and kill a victim and a sexual appetite that knows no bounds. Because Jake had inherited wealth before being turned, he has been able to parlay fortune into ongoing wealth that supports his psychological addictions to liquor, cigars, and prostitutes. His life now is full of meaningless and emotion-free sex, horrifically grisly murders, and a deep-seated ennui as he imagines two hundred more years of this kind of existence.



As the novel opens, Jake has just found out that the second-to-last werewolf, The Berliner, has been beheaded by Eric Grainer, an elite-level Hunter with Native American ancestry who works for the World Organization for the Control of Occult Phenomena, or WOCOP for short. This means that Grainer will now come for Jake in order to annihilate the species. Besides being excellent at his job, Grainer has a personal vendetta against Jake—Jake ate Gainer’s father several years ago, and Gainer is excited to take his revenge.

When Gainer vows to behead Jake at the next full moon, Jake realizes that he relieved. So far, he has been avoiding WOCOP with the help of his familiar Hartley, who works at WOCOP and feeds Jake information about their plans. Now, though, Hartley is growing old, and Jake, tired of life, is happy for a WOCOP-assisted suicide. Jake going willingly doesn’t satisfy WOCOP or Gainer, who wants the thrill of hunting the last werewolf to live up to its promise.

At the same time, WOCOP is keeping its eyes on the other endangered monster species in the world: vampires, who are now down to fifty “families.” Unlike werewolves, the vampires in this world are haughty, withdrawn, sexless creatures. What WOCOP doesn’t realize is that the vampires are actively trying to find a way to prevent their “allergy” to sunlight—and their most recent research has shown that the same virus that has kept werewolves from infecting those they bite and spawning more of their kind might also be responsible for the limitations of vampires. They now believe that Jake is the key to unlocking a cure.



The novel’s twists, turns, infiltrations, spy games, and intricate plotting is too complex to fully cover. While Gainer is trying to provoke Jake into a rage that will result in the hunt of a lifetime, the vampires lure Jake a different way. They are the keepers of the mysterious and legendary Quinn's book, written by a 1930s archeologist and potentially containing an explanation of where werewolves come from. If Jake cooperates with them, they will let him examine this book—a promise that isn’t resolved in this novel but will potentially come up in the sequels.

In the midst of all of this, Jake comes face-to-face with a creature he has never imagined actually exists: a female werewolf, thought to be a physical impossibility. Jake and Talulla fall immediately in love with each other, have marathon sex sessions, and Jake is inspired to want to live for her sake if not for his own.

The last few chapters of the novel switch from Jake’s perspective to Talulla’s—a transition that still manages to make Jake’s fate surprising. Jake is killed, a spear through his stomach. The novel ends with Talulla contemplating her life without Jake, and considering the fate of her unborn were-baby. Their story is picked up in the second novel in the series, Talulla Rising.