With The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, madcap Russian novelist Victor Pelevin delivers a mind-fuck of a metaphysical tale that centers around the spiritual journey and sexual exploits of a 2000-year-old werefox named A Hu-Li. While following the Supreme Tao, Hu-Li — who possesses the body of a nubile, Asiatic 14-year-old — sustains herself by feeding on the life force of sexed-up humans, in the guise of a bubblegum-chewing Moscow prostitute. It's surprising, then, when we learn from Hu-Li that, "For the last fifteen hundred years I've had an old maid complex." Although werefoxes never have sex with their clients (instead hypnotizing them with their bushy red tails), Hu-Li is unique in that she's never had sex with anyone — not even another were-creature.

Given the blacker-than-black tenor in which the novel commences — "It was already seven-forty and the taxi was still crawling along, shifting from one traffic jam to another. I had a dreary, depressed feeling so deep in my soul that I was almost ready to believe I had one" — you'd be forgiven for being somewhat shocked upon learning that you were in for a love story. And while we don't want to ruin the romance by telling you all the dirty details, let's just say that Pelevin's erotic mind seems to be influenced in equal parts by Lolita and Little Red Riding Hood.

As Hu-Li unfurls her tale and reminisces about having her skirts chased by medieval scholars, being wooed by Russian aristocrats before WWI, and consorting with Chinese courtesans over a millennium ago, Pelevin tosses off acid criticisms of our 21st-century existence in the tiniest of details. To wit, one of Hu-Li's clients pays for drinks with a "Diners Club Platinum Card with a hologram of Che Guevara."

Yet, for all his over-the-top nihilism, Pelevin, who has studied Buddhism, liberally peppers his story with lofty ruminations on the nature of truth and what it's like to fall in love for the very first time. Even as he paints an absurdist portrait of the end times arrived — "The future in which people do not live for something else, but for themselves" — he can't resist casting love as the deus ex machina. As Hu-Li says, "Love was absolutely devoid of any meaning. But it gave meaning to everything else."

-Jocelyn K. Glei