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.
Industry Reviews
"Gorgeous. . . . Irresistible. . . . As with The Last Werewolf, Duncan writes with caustic edge and pop-culturally relevant humor. " --Dallas Morning News
"A lusty, visceral, bloody tale. . . . This is enjoyable stuff. . . . Talulla has the wit and pluck to entertain us."--Cleveland Plain Dealer
"Horror fiction at its best."--The Oregonian
"Duncan's antihero is an apex female predator, the antithesis of Stephenie Meyer's gothy milksop. She's smart, confident, and a caring mother. She's also a ferocious man-eater . . . The spectacle alone is worth the price of admission."--NPR
"The horror genre at its best--wildly imaginative, written with wit and intelligence, wickedly entertaining." --The Times (UK)
"Flat-out killer. . . . This harmonic hybrid delivers sweet (plot), salty (character), sour (emotional pathos), bitter (psychological probity), and umami (stylistic and linguistic panache). . . . Best described as a gleeful three-way between Raymond Chandler's entire oeuvre, Anne Rice's vampire novels and Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum. . . . A high-calorie blast. . . . Duncan delivers with intelligent humanity a monster we want to track and befriend, even knowing she would happily eat us alive." --New York Times Book Review
"A howling good read. . . . Horrifying and humorous, imaginative and energetic."--CNN
"Duncan is an immensely talented literary novelist, and with Talulla Rising, he has again proved you don't have to be driving with a learner's permit to enjoy a good vampire-versus-werewolf book. . . . Its descriptions of sex and violence--by turns hallucinatory and anatomically precise--might render Twilight fans blind and mute. Everyone else should have a blast, though." --Richmond Times-Dispatch
"In Talulla Rising, Duncan again creates an oddly engaging world defined almost exclusively by the abnormal . . . The story moves from Alaska to London to Italy to Crete, makes good use of the monsters' special powers, offers cliff-hanging moments. . . . Duncan can be awfully entertaining." --Bloomberg News
"A lusty, visceral, bloody tale [told in] capable, muscular prose . . . This is enjoyable stuff . . . Duncan's werewolves are never cartoons . . . Talulla has the wit and pluck to entertain us."--Cleveland Plain Dealer
"As well as being thought-provoking, it's all great fun . . . Duncan's writing does more than transcend genre fiction: it creeps up on it in the dead of night, rips out its heart, then eats it."--The Guardian
"I like now and then to be reminded that I am a companion of the Wild Beast, and Glen Duncan ensures that I never forget it. He writes brilliantly of the presence of evil in its most contemporary disguise, with its heady temptations of heedless abundance, hunger, and satiety. Never again will it be possible to think of werewolves as mere metaphor. This fierce, witty, and erotic novel is full of surprises, both provocative and illuminating." --Susanna Moore
