Howling for Halloween

Halloween is my favorite holiday.  I have always loved getting dressed up in costumes, pretending to be someone else for a few hours.  Plus there’s the candy; who wouldn’t love the idea of a socially sanctioned extortion of candy from your neighbors for merely dressing up in a costume?   The scary aspect of Halloween is an additional bonus for me as I enjoy being frightened – just a little bit. To get in the mood for Halloween, I like to spend October reading books with a supernatural theme.

Last summer many reviewers recommended The Last Werewolf by Glen Duncan as an excellent literary horror novel.  Duncan does manage to skillfully combine the blood and gore of a werewolf story with the wit, erudition and masterful language of literary fiction. His protagonist, Jake Marlowe, is a 201-year-old werewolf, an educated English gentleman bitten and turned werewolf on a trip to Wales in 1846.

 As the novel opens, Jake learns he is the last of his species, due to an unfortunate set of circumstances.  No one has survived a werewolf attack for decades past owing to a virus, and WOCOP, a worldwide organization sworn to destroy occult creatures, has hunted werewolves to extinction.  When Jake isn’t devouring people during the full moon, he is musing existentially about the futility of his life, about what it means to be the last of his kind.  Jake is no dumb beast.  His thoughts run along these lines:  “In ages past the beast in man was hidden in the dark, disavowed. The transparency of modern history makes that impossible…  The beast is redundant. It’s been us all along.”

Duncan gives us a conflicted character in Jake Marlowe.  He has grown weary of the life he lives between full moons, only feeling his true self when he is the monster eating his victims.  He can feel all their lives inside him.  Then he becomes the hunted, not the hunter, with a motivation for survival that overcomes his suicidal thoughts as the novel takes on more of a thriller tone.

The Last Werewolf is no romanticized version of werewolves like the Twilight series.  Be warned – there is plenty of graphic description of violence and sex in the pages of Duncan’s novel.  But The Last Werewolf is the thinking person’s werewolf novel.  See if it will put you in the Halloween mood.

Next time – a ghost story.  Or is it a ghost story?