Talulla Rising

I read and enjoyed very much Glen Duncan's The Last Werewolf, and he has written a sequel, Talullah Rising. Talulla is the werewolf whose existence surprised Jake in the first book. He had thought there was a virus prohibiting new werewolves being created, but the virus has been eradicated. Now Talulla is going lupine every full moon.

As the book begins, she's hiding out in Alaska with her familiar, Cloquet. She's about to feed when she goes into labor and pops out twins (courtesy of the now dead Jake). But vampires attack (werewolf blood is thought to help vampires endure sunlight) and steal one of her children. She's determined to get the baby boy back.

Along the way she finds out that the vampires in question are actually a splinter group that believe that the original vampire, Remshi, is back and going to begin a new reign on Earth, and that sacrificing a werewolf is key to their success. Talulla ends up working with ex-occult agents, one of whom, Walker, becomes her lover. She also finds out that there are more werewolves around, and that making one is easier than she thought.

Much of this is gruesome fun, but it's a decided step down from The Last Werewolf. Much of Duncan's style is to step back and describe the proceedings in a kind of "can you believe this?" manner. "Walker was at the top of the stairs, face rich with what he'd just seen: Me, the woman who'd been fucking him with increasing nuance and dangerous warmth, down on all fours eating an eviscerated human being."

Also, Duncan writes through the voice of Talulla, and I never was convinced that it was female voice. When I wrote erotica, I wrote as a woman lots of times, but I never thought I was fooling anybody. Talulla's thoughts are clearly a man's. It's explained away that she is taken over by wulf, who is horny as hell, but that's a cop out. 

Still, there are some fines turn of phrase in this book, even if there are too many last second rescues stemming from someone we didn't know was a werewolf bursting through a door in wolf form. And I just loved Duncan's references to pop culture, such as this music criticism: "From a floor below someone was singing with a karaoke machine, Paul McCartney's 'Simply Having a Wonderful Christmas Time,' completely out of tune. 'Beyond doubt the worst Christmas song ever written,' New York said to me, quietly. 'Like a request to God to end the universe.'"

Judging by the way the book ends, there will be further chronicles of Talulla and her supernatural friends and enemies. I will probably keep up, but I hope for a book that is a little more polished than this one.