The Devourers

Indra Das

Completed 5/4/2019, Reviewed 5/4/2019

4 stars

This was an unusual novel, billed as a werewolf novel, but it isn’t exactly.  It’s a shape-shifter story which takes place in India now and several hundred years in the past.  It tackles issues of rape, gender-roles, identity, and love.  I was not consumed by this story within a story as I thought I’d be, but it does have glorious prose and its take on the shape-shifter trope feels fresh.  It won the Lambda Literary Award for SF/Fantasy/Horror and was nominated for the Tiptree Award.  Although I didn’t thoroughly enjoy the book, I feel that it is something special and worth a read.

The overarching plot Is about Alok, an Indian college professor who meets a stranger at a circus-like event.  The stranger confesses that he is not human, but something akin to a werewolf.  Alok is intrigued.  The stranger asks him to transcribe scrolls that contain the story of one such man-eating shape-shifter and the woman who he loves.  As Alok types out this story, he becomes obsessed with it and the stranger. 

The inner story is about Fenrir, a taken name based on the giant wolf of Norse Mythology.  He is in a pack of three shape-shifters.  Fenrir, despite having a sexual relationship with his pack mates, falls in love with a human woman.  Rather than having a normal relationship with her, he rapes her.  Love and sex with humans are forbidden by the shape-shifters’ tribes, and the pack breaks up rather violently.  The story then becomes the tale of the journey of the woman with one of the former pack mates, as she seeks her perpetrator and comes to grip with bearing a hybrid child.

As I mentioned at the start, the prose is wonderful.  It makes for an easy read and creates multidimensional characters.  I really liked Alok, who is basically a hapless, lonely, bisexual person struggling to find intimacy among his few friends.  His growing obsession with the stranger is a desperate cry for attention, despite the possibility of danger, assuming the stranger’s tale is real.  The stranger of course is interesting because of the mystery he weaves.  But the real star of the book is the raped woman who despite not trusting anyone since her mother died, and having just experienced this violence against her, comes to trust Fenrir’s pack mate.  Her anger is very real, and at times difficult to read because it is written so well.  The bulk of the story is about her and her journey to find Fenrir. 

There is a lot of violence in the book, and it has a very gritty feel to it.  The devouring of humans by the shape-shifters is very graphic.  There is also a lot of urinating to mark territory.  In general, there’s just a lot of bodily fluids in this book.  It’s hard to stomach at times, as the woman vomits a lot, but it all adds to the very vivid nature of her experience, as well as that of the shape-shifters.

I give the book four stars out of five.  I was going to give it three because I wasn’t that engaged with the book, but looking at it objectively, this is some fine writing and a fairly unique story.  I had to bump it up a star because of this.  The book has some action, but basically, it’s a study of issues and transgressions.  I recommend it to anyone who likes their books a little more philosophical and didactic.