Shape-shifters lurk in Kolkata
Alok Mukherjee is a lonely Indian history professor attending a concert in Kolkata when a stranger, smoking some hash, approaches him with a strange secret. He is a half-werewolf with a story. And so begins The Devourers by first-time novelist Indra Das.
Compelled by curiosity, the professor takes on the task of typing his new friend’s transcribed notebooks, full of the most extraordinary memoir. Once upon a time, a werewolf from Europe arrived in India with two other shape-shifters. This sets up the novel’s structure, which unfolds within multiple time periods, voices and locations: the stranger and the professor in the present day, the werewolf and his prey in the 17th century.
Norse shape-shifter Fenrir is immortal and hungry for human flesh but becomes enamoured by Cyrah, a prostitute he meets on his travels. Believing humans are only capable of killing and raping, he forces himself on her, with the intention of doing what is forbidden to his tribe — creating natural-born offspring.
In doing so, Fenrir breaks the compact with his companions. His lover, Gévau- dan, the youngest of the trio, tries defending him, but his fate is sealed: exile. To get Fenrir back, Gévaudan lures Cyrah in as bait. Together they travel — woman and werewolf — in search of a creature who chose to tempt fate.
At the heart of the book are the stories shared across cultures — the frightening creatures lurking in the shadows of our imaginations, where monsters can appear as one of us, yet lust to consume us out of animal instinct all the same. Das also plays with the idea of what it means to be human, and how much self-control is needed to do the right thing.
While Das sets most of the novel in the past, he does remember to return to the increasingly complicated relationship between the professor and the stranger. The Devourers is an unsettling and sometimes uneven book located in a vicious fantasy world taking the legends of old to make something new.