Glen Duncan got strong reviews for his novels and showed up on lists of best young writers. But that didn’t sell his books or get publishers to buy them. Then, in his 40s, Duncan made a drunken New Year’s resolution to write a book about werewolves. He pulled it off, and last year Knopf published The Last Werewolf. The sequel, Talulla Rising, is just out. It’s about a pregnant woman whose lover has died, and every full moon, she turns into a bloodthirsty monster.

Duncan says although he got into the supernatural horror genre on a lark, the moral quandary of the werewolf myth is what fascinates him — specifically, his heroine’s inability to control her transformation. “If you said to someone, ‘Right — you’re a werewolf, you have to kill and eat another person once a month, or you will die’ — the moral reflex, the fairy story is to say, ‘Oh, I’d kill myself. It’s untenable,’” Duncan tells Kurt Andersen. “And yet, I don’t think you would. My suspicion is that a large number of people would negotiate, would accommodate atrocity. And I suppose that’s the heart of the metaphor.”

Bonus Track: Glen Duncan reads from Talulla Rising