Mod-glam vampire rot has finally lost its reign at Top of the Pops. And in many ways, this is a story that pits these pitiful snobs prone to catatonia against the more comely monsters of hunger, lust and depravity – werewolves. For a serious literary novelist on his seventh book, this is a brave move. Duncan has made his name writing about sex and violence (see I, Lucifer), and to add further supernatural elements to this well-traversed territory risks triteness. But this isn’t your regular gothic-horror-thriller.

Jacob Marlowe, an Oxfordshire gentleman, turned werewolf 167 years ago (1842) on a walking tour in Wales. Now, he’s fallen into deep despondency and melancholy. He’s exhausted the modes: ‘hedonism, asceticism, spontaneity, reflection, everything from miserable Socrates to the happy pig’. Thus what ensues is a fatalistic ennui, and preparedness to meet his death on the next moon of the Curse. He is the last of his species, being hunted for years by the World Organisation for the Control of Occult Phenomena (WOCOP). Of course, plans are hampered by Hollywood plot twists and lycanthropic hunger and lust – and, quite possibly, love.

Sure there are vampires, hookers and hired mercenaries here too, and while it might all smack of a work adapted from the screen to page, Duncan can certainly turn a phrase. Sitting in a three-piece-suit drinking Macallan and chain-smoking Camel filters, Marlowe tells us that God is dead, but irony’s utterly alive. He’s painfully aware that monsters die out when the collective imagination no longer needs them. You’d be hard-pressed not to howl out loud at Marlowe’s sharp, depraved mind. Think Warren Zevon meets Grinderman, and it’s little wonder that it becomes all the more piquant to have such a mythical beast tilt the lid on twenty-first century humanity.

Luke May is assistant manager of Readings St Kilda