The Devourers is a dark & slow burn, an ode to storytelling and legacy, and a reckoning with identity and who controls it.

When college professor Alok meets a mysterious stranger who claims to be a half werewolf, he can’t help but accept the stranger’s request to transcribe a bizarre collection of texts. Alok is cynical, but can’t look away. And the documents soon transport him back to seventeenth-century India, where a violent shapeshifting traveler is transfixed by a human woman. As the story deepens, so does Alok’s relationship with the stranger – especially as the tales creep closer and closer to the present and the stranger’s own heritage.

I can understand why many people might dislike this book. You have a choice to lean in or push it away. It’s a very stylized read - a bit slow and unusual. It almost feels like it wasn’t written by a modern writer.

It’s an uncomfortable book at times. It’s a visceral attack on the senses (urine, vomit, feces, gore, rape, eating flesh, and other violence). It’s very carnal, very animalistic, very rooted in the body. It leans into the dark side of humanity, illuminating a world of violence.

The Devourers is a queer (& specifically trans) allegory. Each character examines their own relationship to their identity and their body. They challenge what you were born to do and be, ‘how the world is’, predator and prey, and gender assumptions in all forms. 

It ponders storytelling as intimacy (especially when you are expected to distance yourself from all personal emotions), and how the stories told about you shape the footprints you leave in this world. It views myths and folklore not as separate cultural stories, but as different ways of shaping the same existence. 

And yeah, there’s a lot of hunger and cravings and devourings in all forms. It can be grotesque, but also quite beautiful. What does it mean to devour yourself - or to give yourself over to another form - or to devour another and take that ‘othered’ experience into your body and mind? 

I’m not sure every angle of this book came together to offer a completely even whole - and I think that it meandered too long in some moments - but it definitely got me thinking. The Devourers drained me a bit, and its view of the world is mostly unpleasant, but it’s also got some eloquent prose and striking metaphor.

CW: murder, death (parent/child), blood/gore, cannibalism, body horror, excrement, vomit, pregnancy, queerphobia, misogyny, animal death, stalking, sexual content

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