I devoured this book (pun intended). Absorbing from page one, The Last Werewolf is part thriller, part horror, part adventure/dark fairy tale, part love story, with a generous helping of black humor rendered absolutely eloquent by the masterful prose and one of the most likeable anti-heroes in literature.

Jake Marlowe is the last of his kind. At just over two hundred years old, he is sick of himself, sick of life, sick of feelings, sick of the inevitable change into nine feet of furry, horny, blood-thirsty lupine that transforms him every month when the moon waxes full. He is filled with existential angst over the fact that he's no longer filled with existential angst over the people he's murdered (who inhabit him like ghosts, their souls being devoured along with their flesh). Suck on that, Mr. Freud! Because Duncan's werewolves live about 400 years, Marlowe's unlived but inevitably corpse-filled centuries loom ahead of him with as much cheer as a row of coffins that stretches into infinity. He's had enough of himself, enough of the wolf, and has decided to die.


Which doesn't sit well with the man who's dedicated himself to killing Marlow for the last forty years. One wants a proper fight, you know, not some maudlin anti-climatic cakewalk after putting in so much time and energy into revenge. (Marlowe ate his father.)

There is an almost casual genius here, poignant off-hand observations about the human condition, masterful turns of phrase that make me deeply jealous I can't write like this myself. He shows you the worst of what one person can become -- that, knowing killing is morally wrong on every level of comprehension, you are able to move beyond it and even learn to embrace it, to cherish the freedom having no morality gives -- but there is also the tendency toward cheeky self-congratulation, almost as if the author gives the reader the occasional wink and elbow nudge along with a confident, "What do you think? Genius, eh?" He's smart and he knows it and we know he knows it and he knows we know he knows it and once in a while the grandstanding gets in the way of just how great this book really is.

I don't give spoilers so I will only tell you that our wolf friend--bright, sexy, moody, scotch-loving, people-using, prone to self-indulgence and the arrogant disregard of others brought on by the knowledge that they will die long, long before he ever will--will insinuate himself until you are charmed by the very depth of his own self-loathing. You will root for him. You will want him to win, even after he reveals in a perfectly rendered chapter the exact depth of his personal hell and what brought him there.

And there's action. By God, is there action.

Nary a chapter will pass without a violent fight, a gruesome disemboweling, a car chase, a capture, gunfire and/or explosions, and some explicit sex which also is about as romantic as one of those arty European sex movies where they show everyone's cellulite up close and without a music score, the better to deepen the reality of it. More than once (regularly, in fact) the "c" word is described (quite lovingly, oddly enough) to describe a woman's genitalia. Normally this would just gross me out. Here, it works.

Oh, and there's vampires too. They don't sparkle and they don't suffer the pseudo-heroic "don't love me, I'm a monster" BS that neutered Edward Cullen. They are bad ass, and they want our wolf friend too.

Just read it and allow yourself to be amazed.