The Last Werewolf: kill, or die

Posted at 10:15 AM on July 14, 2011 by Marianne Combs (0 Comments)
Filed under: Books, Writing

If your choice was between death, and killing another human being, what would you do?

What if, in order to survive, you had to kill once a month?

Such is the moral dilemma faced by Jake Marlow, the protagonist of Glen Duncan's "The Last Werewolf."

Duncan told Midmorning's Kerri Miller that Marlow's situation is just an extreme version of dilemma's that human beings face in their own lives.

What you get with Jake is a personality that is divided, a psyche that is divided. ...Intellectually his position is an existential one, that the universe is absurd, and godless and demonstrates that on a daily basis. There are no absolute moral values. Nobody's watching, nobody's keeping score. Nothing supernatural will happen to you as a result of doing the wrong thing. That's what his intellect tells him.

But he is of course still an emotional being as well, one with imagination and a past that informs his sense of right and wrong at an emotional level. This is what makes his dilemma a very common human dilemma.

You can hear Duncan's entire conversation with Kerri Miller by clicking on the audio link below:

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