The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

Content levels

Trigger warnings

Positive tags

Hero archetypes

Heroine archetypes

Protagonist archetypes

Tropes

Themes

Synopsis

Paranormal meets transcendental in this provocative and hilarious novel. Victor Pelevin has established a reputation as one of the most brilliant writers at work today; his comic inventiveness has won him comparisons to Kafka, Calvino, and Gogol, and Time has described him as a "psychedelic Nabokov for the cyberage." Pelevin's new novel, his first in six years, is both a supernatural love story and a satirical portrait of modern Russia. It concerns the adventures of a hardworking fifteen-year-old Moscow prostitute named A. Huli, who in reality is a two thousand-year-old were-fox who seduces men in order to absorb their life force; she does this by means of her tail, a hypnotic organ that puts men into a trance in which they dream they are having sex with her. A. Huli eventually comes to the attention of and falls in love with a high-ranking Russian intelligence officer named Alexander, who is also a werewolf (unbeknownst to our heroine). And that is only the beginning of the fun. A huge success in Russia, this is a stunning and ingenious work of the imagination, arguably Pelevin's sharpest and most engrossing novel to date.

The Sacred Book of the Werewolf: content & age rating

Intended for adult readers (18+).

This novel contains explicit sexual content involving a protagonist who is a sex worker using supernatural means to seduce clients, graphic descriptions of sexual acts (though presented through surrealist/philosophical lens), dark themes of exploitation, and mature satirical commentary on contemporary Russian society.

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