Book Review: The Devourers

Captivated by the stranger, and the opportunity to know about his seemingly immortal life, Mukherjee agrees to translate several scrolls given to him — timepieces that date back to the beginning of Fenrir and Cyrrah’s first meeting in Mumtazabad during the reign of Shah Jahan, and their conflicted relationship that upturns the course of their lives.

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Fenrir, a Norse werewolf, is travelling across empires with two other werewolves, Gévaudan from France and a Greek, Makedon. When Fenrir meets Cyrrah, a poor, young Muslim woman, he wants her to love him, so he breaks the most important code of his tribe: humans are only meant to be food, not playthings to copulate with. Things escalate and Cyrrah must find a way to survive a world of brutality and constant danger.

Das has been writing speculative fiction for a while — his work has appeared in Clarkesworld magazine and Asimov’s Science Fiction. Speculative fiction is, in a nutshell, a literary genre which has elements of the supernatural, the fantastical and the future.

In The Devourers, Das sets the stage for an incredible, exhilarating ride through the ages. Mukherjee’s first interaction with the werewolf is bizarre and quite funny; one wishes that Das had retained some of that irreverence that is so engaging in the beginning. Sadly, that is not to be — as soon as Mukherjee begins to work on the scrolls, the narrative voices of the past sound constrained. Das is ambitious in the way he double-dutches from different strands of the novel, switching between eras and characters. But it doesn’t quite come together and there’s the rub. When located in the present, Das’s prose is elegant and effective, the past throws the plot off-kilter. A novel just about a werewolf in Kolkata today would have been just as fascinating to read, especially if he’s beautiful, single and rolling his own joints.