"Talulla Rising," a Novel by Glen Duncan If literature is lacinato kale, genre is gelato. Despite regular critical attempts to reconstruct this outdated food pyramid, the base holds strong. Fortunately, thanks to a surge in literary molecular gastronomy, readers can enjoy an ever wider array of broccoli rabe (or brussels sprout, or Swiss chard) ice cream. When cooked by mad word scientists like Glen Duncan - whose new horror novel, "Talulla Rising," is a sequel to "The Last Werewolf" - this harmonic hybrid delivers sweet (plot), salty (character), sour (emotional pathos), bitter (psychological probity) and umami (stylistic and linguistic panache). If books were required to list the nutritional value of their contents, Duncan's sumptuously gluttonous werewolf saga would rank as high in pure cane sugar as it does in omega-3s. "Talulla Rising" powers up where "The Last Werewolf" concluded, which means it, and this review, will be unavoidably full of spoilers for people who haven't read the first book. Talulla Demetriou, Duncan's werewolf heroine, has fallen on bad times. Her werewolf soul mate, Jake Marlowe, has been killed by the World Organization for the Control of Occult Phenomena. Despite a supposed werewolf inability to reproduce, she learns she's pregnant with Jake's twins. Sequestered and gestating in rural Alaska with her "familiar" (a trusted human helper), she's discovered by vampires in the midst of labor: one twin out, the second safely in. The vamps abduct her minutes-old son, leaving Talulla, after she delivers her daughter, the book-long challenge of retrieving him. 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." Proust, as usual, is watching from the corner. What distinguishes Talulla from your standard werewolf is that she worries. In the face of cultural expectations, Talulla is a humiliated failure. (A young drifter she kidnaps in Alaska, and plans to eat when the moon is full, exclaims: "How can you do this? I mean you're . . . pregnant!") She's lonely. Talulla grapples with the alienating act of emotionless sex with humans - the moral stopgap she's installed to prevent herself from eating people she loves. Jake, before he started compartmentalizing, ate his human wife and unborn child. She must battle the presumed mutual exclusivity of her maternal and her sexual incarnations, in addition to the vampires seeking werewolf blood to fulfill the mandate of an ancient text. Talulla agonizes: Can a woman who kills and consumes innocent people and craves near-constant sex - often with strangers or even enemies, so indomitable is her libido - be a fit parent? A mother can be a monster, but can a monster be a mother? Duncan locates the familiar in the unfamiliar, using his hairy werewolf lens to refract the workaday foibles of a more pedestrian reality. "Talulla Rising" is as much about parenting as werewolfing; it's "We Need to Talk About Kevin" for the paranormal set. Talulla suffers doubt just like people who don't salivate at the promise of baroque gore. She anguishes over her questionable maternal aptitude, classifying herself as a "dead-hearted bitch who didn't love her babies," even as she's behaving like a pretty stellar she-wolf. She doesn't immediately adore her daughter, not because she can't adore her but because she's afraid of losing her. Her alienation from her postnatal human self is touchingly, wittily rendered. Of her twin placentas, she says, "They looked like a pair of revolting purses." Her infant son languishes motherless in a vampire prison, it's true, but not through any fault of hers, and she repeatedly risks her life trying to rescue him. In order to blunt the pain of her son's possible death, she counsels herself, "You have to think of him as an object." Cold? Maybe. Also savvy and practical. Wisely strategic, rather than hasty or emotional. All of which makes Talulla a paranormally primo mom, despite her incessant hand-wringing. I wanted to shake her by the shoulders and tell her that, under the circumstances, she's doing a swell job. Even the judgmental online parenting crowd would probably absolve Talulla of her steeliness given her daily travails involving (among other things) her son's imminent ritual sacrifice by vampires desiring immunity from sun damage. And along with the soundtrack of her internal doubt, she's also haunted by her victims. Duncan's werewolves ingest not just flesh but souls and personal histories. For a werewolf, to eat is to witness the ultimate home movie, the lives and feelings of his or her prey released by the digestive juices. The voices remain inside forever, a chorus of consciences. Heidi Julavits's most recent novel, "The Vanishers," was published in March.