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shayfiction's review against another edition
Really tired to give this another shot via audiobook this time. Just boring to me.
starrysteph's review
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.75
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.
“We are the devouring, not the creative.” / “I marveled that these were beings that didn’t know love. Then again, they were fighting because they had, each in their own way, found the same.”
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.
“I am forever amid the possibility of the impossible.”
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.
“I am a character in myth, in folklore, and no one even knows it.”
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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spellbookspines's review
3.0
To write dark fantasy you need to do more than just mention piss and blood over and over. Give me gross shapeshifters but commit to it! The ideas here were fascinating but unfortunately there's nothing this book executed particularly well.
kell_xavi's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
mysterious
medium-paced
3.5
I was enamoured with this writing at the very beginning, Das’ canny worldbuilding on the intricate foundations of mythos and South Asian history. The stories herein are a poetic and gritty recovery of people, fundamentally, though their forms and settings carve the shape of the narrative. The courage and tenacity of one woman (a major player in the text) is an especially strong point, and the choices of the shapeshifters who take the bodies of men deepen what initially appears as swaggering brutality.
There is much about the body here, a visceral beastliness and texture to embodiment in many forms—though it is characterized by releasing of waste, blood, semen more often than is my preference. There is also a violence towards bodies, in their ripping apart and consumption, or the devouring of the title. Sexual encounters are carnal and animal as well, filled with pungency, passion.
This is not a book for everybody, but I appreciated the ways in which Das made his shapeshifters seem more animal than supernatural, with an intensity to their worldliness. There is heat and bulk to them, rage and suffering. There is also a culture told by ritual, language, and customs that I could follow in their repercussions while not fully understanding their meanings. Where romance and human-creature relationship are prevalent in many supernatural novels, The Devourers is a welcome subversion. This book at once denies those plot lines, and works them back in, with more messiness and devastation that creates small, earned moments of tenderness.
My last point, and another delightful subversion, is that this book is very queer. When we first meet him, the narrator (Alok) is quietly and somewhat shamefully bisexual; however, though I emohasize it here, in the text this queerness and gender is shown as a part of having a body—of embodying, using and changing flesh. The shapeshifters can choose the appearance of their first (humanoid) selves and their second (beastly) selves, altering gender or appearing with multiple genitalia. They are also sexual in a way not precluded by gender. Though women are treated with a misogyny that fits the historical context, the author (and the narrative) focus/es on agency and inner life of Cyrah with empathy and admiration.
There is much about the body here, a visceral beastliness and texture to embodiment in many forms—though it is characterized by releasing of waste, blood, semen more often than is my preference. There is also a violence towards bodies, in their ripping apart and consumption, or the devouring of the title. Sexual encounters are carnal and animal as well, filled with pungency, passion.
This is not a book for everybody, but I appreciated the ways in which Das made his shapeshifters seem more animal than supernatural, with an intensity to their worldliness. There is heat and bulk to them, rage and suffering. There is also a culture told by ritual, language, and customs that I could follow in their repercussions while not fully understanding their meanings. Where romance and human-creature relationship are prevalent in many supernatural novels, The Devourers is a welcome subversion. This book at once denies those plot lines, and works them back in, with more messiness and devastation that creates small, earned moments of tenderness.
My last point, and another delightful subversion, is that this book is very queer. When we first meet him, the narrator (Alok) is quietly and somewhat shamefully bisexual; however, though I emohasize it here, in the text this queerness and gender is shown as a part of having a body—of embodying, using and changing flesh. The shapeshifters can choose the appearance of their first (humanoid) selves and their second (beastly) selves, altering gender or appearing with multiple genitalia. They are also sexual in a way not precluded by gender. Though women are treated with a misogyny that fits the historical context, the author (and the narrative) focus/es on agency and inner life of Cyrah with empathy and admiration.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Blood and Violence
Moderate: Misogyny, Pregnancy, Rape, Cannibalism, Body horror, Gore, and Colonisation
Minor: Vomit, Excrement, Biphobia, Animal death, and Classism
w0lfyfr3n's review
slow-paced
1.0
I was excited to start reading a book that I thought was about queer werewolves but this defied my expectations in the wrong direction. [Spoilers ahead]
For characters that can allegedly shift into any form, the three main non-humans inexplicably take the shape of frustratingly cryptic and uniquely horrid men. I was more interested in what was developing between Alok and the half werewolf but a good 80% of the book is not about their dynamic, and when it is, the nice tender moments are eclipsed by the unsatisfying and mysterious way in which their meetings end
Apart from this, the repeated flippant mentions of all forms of abuse, and the unnecessarily vivid descriptions of all bodily fluids threw me off completely. An overall uncomfortable read.
Apart from this, the repeated flippant mentions of all forms of abuse, and the unnecessarily vivid descriptions of all bodily fluids threw me off completely. An overall uncomfortable read.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Sexual assault, Homophobia, Violence, and Excrement
charliedryder's review
challenging
dark
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
morgob's review against another edition
4.0
Let's say this is more like a 3.5. This was a very strange book, for a lot of different reasons. It's partially odd because it reminds me of some classics that are written in a similar way, where most of the story is told to the reader via another method, sort of like how Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights are. The majority of the story is given to the narrator in the form of some scrolls he must translate and type out. All of the stories pieced together make something quite interesting and quite beautiful, in a very sad way. But the pieces, once separated, are weird and definitely don't seem like they should fit together. In short, this was a very odd but captivating read about "werewolves" and humans, and sort of another take on how very long lives can be lived, to the point where the beast within completely separates from the human self, and I don't mean that just in the way of the shapeshifters. It is a love story at its core, a very sad and despairing one, but it is equally a story of hate. For the entirety of reading it, I wasn't sure if I liked it or not, but for me, the pieces all fit together at the end to form a work of art. This review was very cryptic, I know, but there is a lot that can be given away easily.
kelleyannelyse's review
dark
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
Content Warnings
Graphic: Injury/Injury detail, Rape, Excrement, Violence, and Gore
Minor: Homophobia
revacholdawn's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
lazy_raven's review against another edition
3.0
it was a bit slow starting to read it but, over all its good. a different twist on supernatural tales. i got lost a few times, occasionally hard to figure out which character is speaking, but being his first published book is fairly well written.