I looked down to see seven or eight inches of a precision-pointed wooden javelin protruding from my gut. Lignum vitae. Second in hardness only to Australian buloke. In the moment it took me to turn around, I thought: This fucker isn't taking any chances.
Remshi is used to people trying to drive a stake through his heart. He's been alive for twenty thousand years; it's going to happen.
But other things are changing.
These new assailants, for example, are quicker. And for the first time ever Remshi's sleep has brought dreams. And there's an aching gap in his memory that turns out to contain a werewolf (a werewolf?) to whom he is irresistibly drawn.
This is not just any werewolf, though. It's Talulla Demetriou.
The epic conclusion to the Bloodlines Trilogy throws Remshi and Talulla and their werewolves and vampires into a vat of new alliance and enmity and sex and gore, then stirs furiously with a sharpened stick. By Blood We Live takes Glen Duncan's gloriously written, adrenaline-charged horror homage to new heights.
Glen Duncan was born in Bolton in 1965 and studied philosophy and literature at Lancaster University. His first novel, Hope, was published in 1997 and has been followed by seven further novels. I, Lucifer (2002) was shortlisted for the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. His work has been translated into more than a dozen languages. He lives in London.
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'A magnificent novel. A brutal, indignant, lunatic howl. A sexy, blood-spattered page-turner, beautifully crafted and full of genuine suspense, that tears the thorax out of the horror genre to create something that stands rapturous and majestic and entirely on its own.' Nick Cave on The Last Werewolf
'Duncan delivers with intelligent humanity a monster we want to track and befriend, even knowing she would happily eat us alive...Duncan's throbbing, fornication-crazy plot defies easy encapsulation, but is 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...The arch relationship Duncan establishes with his readers - along with his scathingly intelligent psychological insights and flat-out killer writing, his companionably high-mannered narrative voice and his mad plot chops - makes Talulla Rising a high-calorie blast.' New York Times Book Review
