Talulla Rising
-
-
4.3 • 66 Ratings
-
-
- $7.99
Publisher Description
When I change I change fast. The moon drags the whatever-it-is up from the earth and it goes through me with crazy wriggling impatience . . . I’m twisted, torn, churned, throttled—then rushed through a blind chicane into ludicrous power . . . A heel settles. A last canine hurries through. A shoulder blade pops. The woman is a werewolf.
The woman is Talulla Demetriou.
She’s grieving for her werewolf lover, Jake, whose violent death has left her alone with her own sublime monstrousness. On the run, pursued by the hunters of WOCOP (World Organisation for the Control of Occult Phenomena), she must find a place to give birth to Jake’s child in secret.
The birth, under a full moon at a remote Alaska lodge, leaves Talulla ravaged, but with her infant son in her arms she believes the worst is over—until the windows crash in, and she discovers that the worst has only just begun . . .
What follows throws Talulla into a race against time to save both herself and her child as she faces down the new, psychotic leader of WOCOP, a cabal of blood-drinking religious fanatics, and (rumor has it) the oldest living vampire.
Harnessing the same audacious imagination and dark humor, the same depths of horror and sympathy, the same full-tilt narrative energy with which he crafted his acclaimed novel The Last Werewolf, Glen Duncan now gives us a heroine like no other, the definitive twenty-first-century female of the species.
BONUS MATERIAL: This ebook edition includes an excerpt from Glen Duncan's By Blood We Live.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Decidedly not for the squeamish, Duncan's disturbingly raunchy sequel to his 2011 supernatural thriller, The Last Werewolf, finds newly turned werewolf Talulla Demetriou hiding out in a remote hunting lodge near Fairbanks, Alaska, mourning her dead werewolf lover, Jake Marlowe, by whom she's pregnant. After Talulla delivers boy-girl befurred twins, vampires kidnap her newborn son as a sacrifice to bring back their mythic progenitor. With baby daughter Zo in tow, Talulla sets out after the vampires in a quest to regain her son that will bring her in contact with more of her kind. Once a month she changes into a nine-foot-tall monster who lusts after her victims before killing and eating them, but in between gorges she fancies herself Moll Flanders, "immoral, shallow, hypocritical, heartless, a bad woman." From time to time Talulla endures tortures that would have been more powerful if suggested rather than wallowed in. The philosophizing may strike some readers as painfully facile, even for a werewolf.
Customer Reviews
Fun read
Enjoyed all the exciting adventures of Talulla and Co. Just a bit overdone with all the abductions. Hope there is another book to continue the story.
Talulla Rising
An unworthy successor to "The last Werewolf," but still a fun read. Buy it.
The main character of "Talulla Rising" has precisely the same voice as the main character in "The Last Werewolf," the first of Glen Duncan's werewolf novels. This is preposterous: Talulla is a woman, while the predecessor-novel's protagonist (Jake) is a man; Jake is an aristocratic Englishman, Talulla was raised by New York restaurant owners. These two are as likely to share idiom as Alec Guiness and Clint Eastwood, but there they are, narrating in identical terms in each one's respective story. An example: Talulla annoyingly refers to the bathroom in a hotel room as the "en suite," which is what Jake called it (and which in all likelihood Glen Duncan calls it in his day-to-day life.) Show me a New Yorker who runs to the en suite to vomit before a full moon and I'll show you a contrivance, not a character.
And that's the point. If you cannot master dialogue -- spoken, narrative, expository, reflective -- you cannot build characters. "The Last Werewolf" was a rarity: a character-driven horror novel. But without a fully formed character for a protagonist, "Talulla Rising" can't separate itself from the pack of Werewolf/Vampire/Zombie books that have hogged the zeitgeist for years now.
There's good news, though. As a plot-driven potboiler, this book excels. The surprises, twists and payoffs are monstrous, as they should be. Character and voice concerns aside, "Talulla Rising" is a blast.
Recommended.