Vampires are creatures that enjoy unnatural long life, sustained by ruthless predation upon other forms of life. Vampire novels are, formally speaking, the same. On and on the genre goes, sucking the lifeblood out of everything from Bram Stoker and Anne Rice to the 'Count of Sesame Street' and that girl from Adventure Time to maintain a pale not-quite-life of its own. On and on, never seeming to die. Werewolves have a similar postmodern hoover-it-up, wolf-it-down wearying endurance quality to them. Of course, Duncan is very far from the first writer to think it might be a nifty idea to combine the two. By Blood We Live is the third in a trilogy that began with The Last Werewolf (2011) and continued with Talulla Rising (2012), and it certainly embodies its premise, formally speaking, insofar as it goes on and on and on and will not lie down and die already just wrap it up my god you've already had 900 pages to tell your story do you really need another 450?
I'm not suggesting Duncan is a bad writer. On the contrary, Duncan can clearly write, and write very well. But what he's written here wearied me a great deal, partly because the plot is too choppily structured, partly because my nonreading of Last Werewolf and Talulla Rising left me more than a little puzzled as to the meaning and/or point of it all, but mostly because it's just really tiring to read so many ripely-written sex scenes, so much goresplash and so many endlessly purpled interior monologues. That all this is pretty adolescent, really, isn't exactly a criticism, because Vampires and Werewolves are fundamentally adolescent imaginative constructions. It's just a little wrongfooting to find such stylistic effort and panache expended upon like a warmth going through him and it was like the warmth of coming home and his face had felt so full and tender with this feeling of ashamed homecoming that even then he'd known would never be free of rage and boredom and sadness and he'd never be anything except alone and what he was [232], not to mention Madeline with her snout in the girl's flank and her ass in the air, legs spread, the smell of her cunt was sly and sweet and full of tortured willingness, and me with a hard-on that could've broken a piano in half [285] (although I am compelled to confess my doubts as to whether 'tortured willingness' is actually a smell), and let's not forget my fingernails went so easily through the soft flesh of his throat ... I got a grip on the wet tubing of his throat and pulled. A lot of it came out. His eyes couldn't open wide enough to fit this surprise in. Miles away, his legs were kicking. I felt my thumbnail go through a big slippery vein. An artery I guess. Blood went through the air like a Spanish fan [385] and pretty soon you're thinking: 'as Tithonus came to regard his own eternal life, so I look now upon the endless stream of neverending vampire/werewolf novels. ἀποθανεῖν θέλω.'
And ever when the moon is low,
And the shrill winds are up and away,
In the white pages, to and fro
We see the randy werewolves play.
But when the moon was very low,
And wild winds bound within their cell,
The shadow of the vampire fell
Upon his bed, across his brow.
He only said, 'This genre's dreary,
Goes on and on,' he said;
He said, 'I am aweary, aweary,
I would that it were dead!'
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