Author: Craig Gidney

The Devourers by Indra Das is that rarest of creatures: the literary horror novel. The graphic imagery, full of viscera and body horror, aims to reveal deeper truths about love and identity, and, ultimately, what it means to be human.

The novel starts in contemporary Kolkata, when Alok, a history professor estranged from his family, meets an intriguing stranger at a street festival. This alluring stranger gives Alok a task: to type up a series of notebooks the stranger has transcribed from scrolls from the late 1500s. The scrolls describe the travels of a pack of shapeshifters as they make their way across the Mughal Empire. Fenrir, the author of the first scroll is an ancient shifter from Scandinavia. The other members of his tribe include a young French loup garou named Gévaudan and an even older one named Makedon, presumably from the Mediterranean. Fenrir’s scroll is written as a love letter to Cyrah, the human woman with whom he has fallen in love. Since humans are considered prey, romantic or sexual attachments to them is strictly taboo in shifter culture. The second scroll is Cyrah’s letter to her shifter son, whom she likens to the indigenous rakshasas mythology of her land. Cyrah and Fenrir’s epic story, which reminds me of the brutal love-and-hate saga at the center of Octavia Butler’s Patternist series, is interwoven with the erotic chemistry of Alok and the stranger’s contemporary story.

The Devourers is a matryoshka novel, full of dense and lyrical prose. Images of violent transformation, transference and flesh eating abound in the novel, which is also a queer love story and a historical novel. There’s an undercurrent dark of eroticism that shimmers through the novel, evident in the eruptive, transgressive werewolf/rakshasas culture. The Devourers is a werewolf novel that has more in common with works by George Bataille or Samuel Delany than it does with Hammer Horror.