Archive for January 19th, 2012|Daily archive page

Illumination

Illumination

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from Like a Detuned RadioJanuary 19, 2012 at 12:11PM

D&D 1st Edition Premium Player’s Handbook

D&D 1st Edition Premium Player’s Handbook:

I like that they’re tying this to the Gygax Memorial Fund, but they needed to do this as a 100% non-profit thing, using the original covers.

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from Like a Detuned RadioJanuary 19, 2012 at 09:49AM

The Last Werewolf

The Last Werewolf

author: Glen Duncan
name: Paul
average rating: 3.34
book published: 2011
rating: 5
read at: 2012/01/18
date added: 2012/01/18
shelves: fantasy, horror, novel
review:
Half a year ago, I read Vladimir Nabokov‘s Lolita and the poetry of it convinced me to take up my writing again in earnest. Irony, alive and well, demands then that Glen Duncan‘s superb literary take on well-tread genre fiction, owing a great deal to Nabokov’s unreliably narrated account of a monster of a different sort, nearly has me throwing my aspirations aside in disgust. The writing in The Last Werewolf is so strong, so lyrical in its profanity and nihilism, the notion of my own meager output being on the same shelf or in the same shop as something like this feels comedic, absurd; the height of folly.

Ducan’s tale chronicles three months in the life of Jacob Marlowe, a two hundred year-old werewolf, the last of his kind. Hunted for centuries by a well-funded group of covert protectorates, werewolves are on the verge of extinction and their last representative is sick of running, sick of waiting, sick of living. His plan is to return to the woods where he was first turned to a werewolf and let the hunters kill him; victim-precipitated homicide. Of course it gets more complicated. The hunters aren’t happy with his compliance, feeling the poetry of assisted suicide is lacking for the culmination of a lengthy project. Plus, the world’s cabal of vampires who want nothing more than to find a cure for their imposed nocturnality have discovered that werewolves are pivotal to promising research that may hold a cure for their sunlight allergy. The forces plot to alternately capture Jacob or inspire him to fight back, none of which is truly successful until unexpectedly something arrives on the scene that changes the whole nature of Jacob’s outlook.

It’s hard to describe the plot in any detail because there is a strong desire to keep the book’s secrets well-hidden until they can be experienced organically. But consider that this is a highly literary account of a character concept that is not at all original but is so dramatically and compellingly realized that it elevates itself beyond genre and into a fascinating character study and a world study as viewed by a partial outsider with a particularly long view. This is probably the appeal of the oft-revisited mythic archetypes: The sub- or super-human nature of vampires and werewolves and so on provide a convenient parallelizing hook to examine the natures of things like death, progress, barbarism, redemption, animalism, sex, love and the cost of it all in extremes that highlight the elements enough that they can be excised from the messy grey mush that it looks like from the mundane human perspective. And Duncan is masterful at dissecting these topics through his first-person mouthpiece. There are so many astounding turns of phrase and blistering insights on display here, it kind of hurts to see how effortless it also is at maintaining pace and even such banal qualities as thrills and titillation. In other words, it’s a very smart book that reads as smoothly as a very dumb book.

The aspiring writer in me wishes I could dissect this formula enough to shamelessly crib it for my own work, but the magic happening within is that through some sort of alchemy Duncan takes a very tired formula, wakes it up with a thundering framework and then decorates it with so much humanity and character that it becomes a kind of sick gem. This isn’t a book you want to hug or lock in a box to protect; Marlowe and Duncan know too much and are far too weary for that kind of sentimentality. Instead, The Last Werewolf makes you want to live, to devour as much of what matters as you can while you can. Forsaking feel-good for feel-empowered, this is ultimately why The Last Werewolf hasn’t completely derailed my dreams. Reading this book I understand that I have a long way to go to reach this kind of mastery where a book can be made exciting, insightful, thoughtful, twisted, funny, sexy, grotesque, beautiful and cerebral all at once by the sheer strength of the author’s skill, but at least I have my high-water mark, my target now set on even scraping this lofty ceiling. And in the meantime, I still have The Last Werewolf to show the way.

<spoiler>I suppose I could find a tiny bit of fault with what is either an open-ended series of questions making the ending a touch incomplete or else wide open for a sequel, as certain things like Quinn’s Journal, the vampires and Jake’s mercenary army are completely unresolved. Still, even if a sequel is not intended or never materializes this is still a remarkable book that should be read by anyone who loves good writing, exciting stories or paranormal novels.</spoiler>

from Paul's bookshelf: readJanuary 18, 2012 at 04:35PM