The Last Werewolf

Zusatztext 44610895 Informationen zum Autor Glen Duncan is the author of seven previous novels. He was chosen by both Arena and The Times Literary Supplement as one of Britain’s best young novelists. He lives in London. Klappentext Glen Duncan delivers a powerful! sexy new version of the werewolf legend! a riveting and monstrous thriller--with a profoundly human heart. Jake Marlowe is the last werewolf. Now just over 200 years old! Jake has an insatiable appreciation for good scotch! books! and the pleasures of the flesh! with a voracious libido and a hunger for meat that drives him crazy each full moon. Although he is physically healthy! Jake has slipped into a deep existential crisis! considering taking his own life and ending a legend that has lived for thousands of years. But there are two dangerous groups--one new! one ancient--with reasons of their own for wanting Jake very much alive. Leseprobe 1 “It’s official,” Harley said. “They killed the Berliner two nights ago. You’re the last.” Then after a pause: “I’m sorry.” Yesterday evening this was. We were in the upstairs library of his Earl’s Court house, him standing at a tense tilt between stone hearth and oxblood couch, me in the window seat with a tumbler of forty-five-year-old Macallan and a Camel Filter, staring out at dark London’s fast-falling snow. The room smelled of tangerines and leather and the fire’s pine logs. Forty-eight hours on I was still sluggish from the Curse. Wolf drains from the wrists and shoulders last. In spite of what I’d just heard I thought: Madeline can give me a massage later, warm jasmine oil and the long-nailed magnolia hands I don’t love and never will. “What are you going to do?” Harley said. I sipped, swallowed, glimpsed the peat bog plashing white legs of the kilted clan Macallan as the whisky kindled in my chest. It’s official. You’re the last. I’m sorry. I’d known what he was going to tell me. Now that he had, what? Vague ontological vertigo. Kubrik’s astronaut with the severed umbilicus -spinning away all alone into infinity . . . At a certain point one’s imagination refused. The phrase was: I t doesn’t bear thinking about. Manifestly it didn’t. “Marlowe?” “This room’s dead to you,” I said. “But there are bibliophiles the world over it would reduce to tears of joy.” No exaggeration. Harley’s collection’s worth a million-six, books he doesn’t go to anymore because he’s entered the phase of having given up reading. If he lives another ten years he’ll enter the next phase—of having gone back to it. Giving up reading seems the height of maturity at first. Like all such heights a false summit. It’s a human thing. I’ve seen it countless times. Two hundred years, you see everything countless times. “I can’t imagine what this is like for you,” he said. “Neither can I.” “We need to plan.” I didn’t reply. Instead let the silence fill with the alternative to planning. Harley lit a Gauloise and topped us up with an unsteady hand, lilac-veined and liver-spotted these days. At seventy he maintains longish thinning grey hair and a plump nicotined moustache that looks waxed but isn’t. There was a time when his young men called him Buffalo Bill. Now his young men know Buffalo Bill only as the serial killer from The Silence of the Lambs . During periods of psychic weakness he leans on a bone-handled cane, though he’s been told by his doctor it’s ruining his spine. “The Berliner,” I said. “Grainer killed him?” “Not Grainer. His Californian protégé, Ellis.” “Grainer’s saving himself for the main event. He’ll come after me alone.” Harley sat down on the couch and stared at the floor. I know what scares him: If I die first there’ll be no salving surreality between him and his conscience. Jake Marlowe is a monster, fact. Kills and devours people, fact. Which...

About the author

Glen Duncan

Product details

• Authors: Glen Duncan
• Publisher: Vintage USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 31.05.2012
• EAN: 9780307742179
• ISBN: 978-0-307-74217-9
• No. of pages: 368
• Dimensions: 132 mm x 201 mm x 21 mm
• Series: VINTAGE BOOKS; The Last Werewolf Trilogy; The Last Werewolf Trilogy
• Subject: Fiction > Science fiction, fantasy