#the devourers

Indrapramit Das' The Devourers is a strange novel, shifting between being narrated by a modern-day professor in Kolkata, and his translations of ancient texts brought to him by a mysterious stranger who claims to be half-werewolf. The werewolves of Das' imagining are immortal shapeshifters who prey upon humans, taking the form of their victims, but remain perpetual wanderers locked away from experiencing human connection—and forbidden from having children. The texts, it's revealed, are the stories of both the stranger's parents: werewolf father and human mother, and their collision.

I appreciated how viscerally disgusting & threatening the werewolves/rakshasa are; the story never shied away from making them genuinely monstrous and not simply misunderstood. My suspension of disbelief was strained a few times during the female POV (would a Mughal-era Muslim prostitute talk this way, or take these actions?) and the pace sometimes dragged. But I was grateful for her elevation in the story and I think a lesser writer (or a less queer one) would have made her a victim. On the whole I would recommend this simply for change of pace: the inventiveness of the creatures, the Indian setting, the centering of gender. Walks the line between genre novel and literary fiction.

birthday book haul!

The Devourers

I was recommended this as an example of a contemporary work where werewolves are actually treated as monstrous and horrifying instead of either romance fodder or one interchangeable variety of supernatural in an urban fantasy kitchen sink. In one sense that was a blatant lie (the monsters are only werewolves in the vaguest sense), but in another one I care about much more it fit the bill perfectly. Funnily enough it basically is a romance (or at least, the overarching framing narrative is), but for once I’m not complaining about that. Excellent read, though does require a bit of a strong stomach.

The framing narrative follows Alok, a history professor in Kolkata whose approached by a mysterious stranger at a festival. The stranger identifies himself as a half-werewolf, an immortal man-eating shapechanger. In between being mysterious and menacing and flirting with Alok, he hires him to transcribe and digitize two historical werewolf manuscripts – journals etched into parchment made from human skin. Those journals are the meat of the narrative, and it rapidly becomes clear they are written by the stranger’s parents; first the ancient norse werewolf who had wandered all the way to the banks of the Yamuna, then the human woman he fell into something like love with and raped as she travels alongside one of his former packmates and hunts him down.

The framing device is the emotional heart of this, and incredibly well interwoven with the manuscript sections. It’s fundamentally a romance, though one somewhat interestingly devoid of real conflict or plot (well, from Alok’s perspective. There’s a whole emotional journey with him going from ‘future food’ to ‘romantic partner’, he just only gets small glimpses of it). There’s I think one real argument or point of conflict between the two of them across the entire book? And maybe one or two points besides that where Alok or their relationship encounters genuine difficulty or danger. Despite that, and despite (or perhaps because of) the ambiguous ending, it all just very much worked for me.

It’s also interesting – and the book does really call this out – that the whole plot is essentially arbitrary. The inciting incident is just a werewolf being angsty and lonesome, and the entire story and all its stakes are strictly interpersonal with nary an epochal revelation or looming existential doom to be seen. It is a sign of how much of my reading diet is genre fiction that this felt like a massive breath of fresh air, I think.

Speaking of love – the book is deeply and intensely preoccupied with the closeness of and overlaps between love and sex and pain and violation and consumption and death. Werewolves consume souls and memories as well as flesh, knowing and even becoming (for a time) those they hunt. This extends to each other as well – regeneration means mating and fighting to the death is an impossibly thin an frequently crossed line, and intimacy and memories are shared by literally allowing someone to take a bit out of you. Izrail kills and consumes both his mother and his father, and this is the only way he ever truly knows either of them. Both he and his father have fallen in love with whole strings of humans across the ages, and each been the ruin of all but one of them. This extends into the use of language as well – I didn’t take notes as I read, but the example that sticks in my mind was the description of one werewolf pressing a mush of chewed flesh into the mouth of another so he might heal as being ‘like a gentle kiss’.

It is just an intensely gory book in general, really. Or not even gory so much as carnal, in the older broader sense. There’s blood and viscera and sweat and sex and piss and shit and tallow made from human fat and game animals eaten bloody and raw. All of it seamlessly intermixed in one richly detailed and incredibly pungent sensory world the book conjures up for you.. This is taken to an extreme whenever the primordial god-monsters that are a shapeshifter’s second soul appears on screen, but even beyond that – like when I say you need a bit of strong stomach to enjoy the book, I really don’t’ just mean in terms of violence.

This ties in a bit with the lack of grand, world-shaking stakes I mentioned but – the book makes excellent use of its period piece sections to really sell this feeling of the weight of history and of being caught up in the wake of events larger than you can perceive. The 17th century sections really nail the sense of the past as its own living, breathing world full of richness and contradictions, rather than just a slate for the present’s psychodrama. Also it’s possibly the first book I’ve ever read which really mentioned the surprisingly widespread and violent history of werewolf hunts in Europe, which I appreciated.

The shapeshifters (werewolves, rakshassa, djinn, ghuls) themselves are absolutely great. Horrifying and disgusting and sublime, with exactly as much detail given as the story needs without succumbing to rpg splatbook syndrome. The idea of werewolves as things which are deliberately created through a(n incredibly violent and traumatizing) ritual process is one I don’t think I’ve seen before? It works here, anyway – though instead of a hereditary curse or contagious infection, it leaves shapeshifters feeling like one of those elite, elevated fraternities who put new inductees through a hell of physical, social and sexual violence for hazing and indoctrination purposes (the usual modern versions being military units, sports teams, and just actual fraternities). Which ties into all those themes of the fine line between love and violence, I suppose.

Or well, not technically fraternity – werewolves are all functionally genderfuild (can take a big nap and wake up looking like whoever they ate last) and while their second selves can fuck I’m not sure either human genders or, like, genital arrangements apply to them. But 3/4 of the werewolves who get any lines are one caricature or another of masculinity and this absolutely informs how the condition and culture are presented. So like, I’ll just go with it.