Indra Das' THE DEVOURERS (Narr by Shishur Kurup & Meera Simhan)

After spending what felt like months entangled in some very long 18th-century styled doorstop fiction, it's pretty refreshing to return to what mostly feels like a straight-up monster story, though there's a lot more going on in Indra Das' The Devourers than that, of course. 

The subject/object of the story has a dramatically weird entrance as a stranger approaches a lonely college professor, one of our twin narrators, Alok, with an arresting declaration -- "I am half-werewolf" -- and says he wants to tell the professor a story. His compelling announcement and first teaser serving of that story have an uncanny and hypnotic impact on Alok that seem more like the powers of a vampire than a werewolf, but as we soon learn, this Stranger sort of started self-identifying as werewolf for complex cultural reasons that started off when he saw,  in his third century of life, An American Werewolf in London. So, uh, buckle up, this is a strange'un.

The novel's overall premise takes more from  Interview with the Vampire, than from any werewolf story I've heard as The Stranger's tale unfolds over several intense encounters with Alok, but it goes Anne Rice one better. Or several - what if Louis were not merely one of Lestat's metaphorical children but his actual biological child by a human mother? And what if most of the story concerned that human mother's epic quest across the length and breadth of Mughal-era India to find her rapist (because of course he was) and give him a good talking-to? And that her traveling companion was one of the werewolf/rapist's ex-packmate, who is pursuing the rapist not out of a quest for justice or to help the newly-pregnant victim, but basically to berate the rapist for having sex with a human, and a female human at that, eww gross, that would be like if a human had sex with a chicken or something because humans are prey. I mean, it's already way more interesting than the pseudo-gothic whining of Anne Rice's sexy but self-pitying characters, right?

The story unfolds in two narratives, one told by Alok, chiefly in the form of intervals in which he tries and fails to make any headway in his relationship with the Stranger who has appointed Alok to transcribe and type a manuscript about the Stranger's shapeshifter people. As with the other narrative, of Cyrah, the Mughal rape victim, there is some sexual tension in Alok's scenes with the Stranger but that's really not the point of the story, any more than it is when we travel with Cyrah and her rapist's friend Gévaudon. Both stories are more concerned with the ineffability of the predators who have made humans their prey, while looking just like them, holding out as a tantalizing mystery, rather than a lore-established certainty, that these shapeshifters were once full humans and that the same transformations they've undergone can happen to Alok or Cyrah as well.

Or, perhaps, the Beasts can regain the humanity that they only think they've lost?

Of course, the Stranger could just be pulling Alok's leg and extorting free editorial services from him, a possibility which is also carefully kept in play as the two intertwined stories unfold.

As often works brilliantly with dual first-person narratives, the audio book edition's producers chose to use different narrators for the two stories, with Shishur Kurup giving Alok exactly the kind of precise diction and haltingly thoughtful speech we'd expect of a lonely college professor who maybe should be questioning his sexuality a little more carefully than he has been, while Meera Simhan gives Cyrah a forcefulness and, yes, bitchiness, that a character like hers would need to survive in a world that is already plenty hostile to a lone, uneducated Muslim woman who has had to turn to sex work in order to survive and has barely done so even before crossing the paths of three slavering monsters who would ordinarily just think of her as a midnight snack. If they are what they think they are. But even if they aren't, Cyrah would have been doomed without that strident willfulness Simhan gives to her every syllable. As her rapist, who claims to be Fenrir from the Norse pantheon just to make sure this story is weird enough, observes, his and Gévaudon's kind are to mere humans as human men are to human women: predators.

Yeah, it's a bit simplistic, but this is the 1650s in India. I mean, an early bit of Cyrah's account describes a partially completed Taj Mahal surrounded in scaffolding.