Talulla Rising by Glen Duncan, Text Publishing, RRP$37, ISBN 9781921922077, Available now.

Remember The Last Werewolf? I sure did. So clever, so funny, so much better at vampires and werewolves than ALL THOSE OTHER BOOKS ABOUT VAMPIRES AND WEREWOLVES.

And along comes Talulla Rising, a sequel (even a little sister, if you will) to The Last Werewolf. How could it ever live up?

The good news is that it does but in quite a different way (that’s sort of the bad news). Where The Last Werewolf was smart and funny and alive, Talulla Rising is a giant… well, werewolf of a book that grabs you by the throat and the stomach and rips them both out in a gushing spray of gore. Yeah, it’s THAT kind of book.

Partially, I think, this is due to a change in narrator – whereas The Last Werewolf was told by Jake Marlowe, Talulla Rising is told by the eponymous Talulla, who begins the book pregnant and about to give birth. We return to the story of WOCOP and the vampires, this time with a “vampire religion” twist, complete with vampire messiah (“He’s not the messiah, he’s a very naughty vampire”).

Talulla is not as convincing an author as Jake, and that made Talulla Rising a harder book to read for me. But that doesn’t take anything away from its sheer visceral rawness. This is not a book for the faint-of-heart or weak-of-stomach and Duncan pushes the story along almost faster than I could keep up with it.

There is now one more book to come in this trilogy… and I can’t wait to see where Duncan takes us next.