Glen Duncan’s novel The Last Werewolf is released this week and you’re bound to hear a few hyperbolically positive reviews floating around the web. They’re all true. The only book I’ve read this year that was this much outright fun to read was Patrick DeWitt’s The Sister’s Brothers.

The title character is Jake Marlowe. He’s made his name-worthy deal with the devil centuries ago, and the devil is him. But after 400 years of ravaging the innocent and the deserving (“Two nights ago I’d eaten a forty-three-year-old hedge fund specialist. . . I’ve been in a phase of taking the ones no one wants”), he’s come to the end.  He’s the last of his kind, hunted by professional zealots with their own particular taste for blood, and he’s ready to just accept his fate, expose himself and go, as gently as his hunters will allow, into that good night.

It won’t be so easy, though, since the hunters are determined to make the last kill a glorious celebration, and Jake finds it difficult to undermine his own instincts for self-preservation.

The Last Werewolf is a novel of several minds, much like its title character. One side is not unlike what we’ve come to expect from our literary lycanthropes: raw muscular beasts with a penchant for sex and bloodletting – and Duncan’s given us that in spades. What he’s also given us is a philosophical main character rooted in the existential. He’s Hamlet amidst the “to be or not to be” soliloquy, or Sisyphus midclimb.

The bigger problem, of Being, just keeps getting bigger . . . . One by one I’ve exhausted the modes: hedonism, asceticism, spontaneity, reflection, everthing from miserable Sorcrates to the happy pig. My mechanism’s worn out. I don’t have what it takes. I still have feelings but I’m sick of having them. Whic is another feeling I’m sick of having. I just . . . don’t want anymore life.

What Duncan gives us too, is a riotous literary treat. Four hundred years is a long time. You can do a lot of reading, even if you take a few days every month for full moon festivities. Marlowe delivers the goods on culture, pop and otherwise, always at the apropos comic moment. Tennyson and Mailer, Kant and Lawrence, the allusions roll from Marlowe’s journal, poking his predecessors in all the right places. Note, for example, the hilarious first sentence to one of his journal entries: “Reader, I ate him.” Funny stuff.

The Last Werewolf is an ideal vacation read. A little campy, a little bloody, very smart, and a hell of a good time.