Everyone’s always tossing in a werewolf to sex things up, but let’s face it: They’re never top dog. “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” was, like, into Season 2 before Oz went all furry. The full moon didn’t rise on “True Blood” till Season 3. We had to suffer through two undead years of CW’s “Vampire Diaries” before we got MTV’s “Teen Wolf.” And you can howl all you want about Team Jacob, but Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight” series clearly belongs to the sparkly bloodsuckers. Even Anne Rice hasn’t touched the old hounds (though she’s working on a novel about them now).
What is it about werewolves that always keeps them panting along behind vampires in popular culture? To see how early the indoctrination starts, check your grocer’s shelves: While kids have been biting into Count Chocula for decades, nobody’s had a bowl of Fruit Brute since 1983. And who’s surprised? After all, Dracula gets to wear elegant clothes, hang out in a castle and give beautiful young women hickeys; werewolves get hairy knuckles and fleas. It sucks, but anybody hoping for parity between these creatures of the night is barking up the wrong tree.
More from Ron Charles
Ron came to The Post in 2005 from the Christian Science Monitor, where he was the Book Editor and lead critic. He lives in Bethesda with his wife, an English teacher at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School.
The real difference, though, is language. Vampires talk us through the kill, and that Transylvanian accent doesn’t hurt. They lure; they seduce; they hypnotize. Even the most romantic werewolf can only drool. And then he rips your face off and pees.
Well, prepare to have your monster world turned upside down. The British writer Glen Duncan has finally driven a stake through vampire supremacy. And it works because he gives his werewolf narrator a voice with teeth. Cerebral and campy, philosophical and ironic, “The Last Werewolf” is a novel that’s always licking its bloody lips and winking at us.
Jake Marlowe is a handsome 200-year-old man with a voracious libido and a hunger for human flesh that drives him crazy once a month. “Two nights ago I’d eaten a forty-three-year-old hedge fund specialist,” he sighs. “I’ve been in a phase of taking the ones no one wants.” Fabulously wealthy and wily, he’s now the world’s last surviving werewolf — “a cocktail of contraries” — and the thought of running from occult assassins any longer makes him weary. “I am tired,” he whines to his longtime confidant. “One’s own death-sentence elicits a mad little hallelujah, and mine’s egregiously overdue. For ten, twenty, thirty years now I’ve been dragging myself through the motions. . . . I really can’t stand it anymore, the living and the killing and the wandering the world without love.”
He may be ready to paw the earth and lay himself down, but the world’s leading werewolf killer expects the thrill of the last hunt, and he’ll do anything to provoke a fight with Jake worthy of his reputation. What’s worse, for some reason, those normally supercilious vampires want a piece of him, too. And so, just a few pages after Jake announces his plans to go gently into that good night, he finds himself instead clawing through a dark thriller that explodes with enough conspiracies, subterfuges and murders to raise your hackles. Not to mention such hot werewolf sex that you’ll be tempted to wander out under the full moon yourself next month.
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