For a first novel, Indra Das hits it out of the park. THE DEVOURERS is an outstanding book, filled with love, hate, joy and pain. You’ll run through every emotion while reading it.

Alok is a college professor who leads a normal, some would say mundane, life, with the usual problems --- work, relationships, broken hearts, family issues, etc. --- but it’s still an easy existence by most accounts. While he spends an evening listening to traveling musicians perform on a warm night in Kolkata, India, he meets a man who tells him an amazing story. The story, the whole experience really, stays with him. In fact, he can’t stop thinking that this stranger transported him into the story, allowing him to see events through the stranger’s eyes. It was more than a story for him, and he can’t let memories of that night, or the stranger, go. Thoughts of the stranger invade his mind and very being, and nothing will distract him. He desperately wants to hear more of the story the stranger told him and how it ends, but what he really wants is to spend more time with the stranger. It becomes an obsession for him that bleeds into his everyday life.

"For a first novel, Indra Das hits it out of the park. THE DEVOURERS is an outstanding book, filled with love, hate, joy and pain. You’ll run through every emotion while reading it."

When the stranger reappears, he asks a favor of Alok --- to translate old notebooks and parchments for him. Wanting to know more, Alok readily agrees for the chance to hear more of the story and have another opportunity to meet the stranger. With a simple yes, Alok begins a new journey that is exciting and terrifying at once, and one he can’t, and doesn’t want to, walk away from.

These parchments and notebooks contain the story of a race of individuals that are human, and so much more, with second-selves that can emerge as beasts, ruled by bloodlust and violence. The story in the scrolls takes place in Mughal India during the 17th century and talks about the travels of three individuals with the power to change into other beings, but also the longings of one to be more --- to be human, to create life. It’s this desire that changes the dynamic of the group and the lives of many forever.

The time slips in this story feel so natural. You don’t care that you’ve just been transported to another time and place because all you care about is the story itself. Just as Alok, you want to hear more of this stranger’s story and experience every disturbing detail. It’s a cold and unfeeling tale, but there’s so much emotion attached to it that you can’t help yourself. You want to hear it all --- every single drop of blood, every gory detail, the murders, the fights, everything. There’s a sparseness to the language that makes your heart pound with both terror and anxiety to know more.

The 17th-century India that Das imagines is amazing. You can picture everything clearly, hear the language spoken and smell the cooking fires. And then we come to the stranger. There’s a tension when he steps back into the story, and it’s something so very wonderful for a character to be able to bring heart-stopping tension to the story in this way. The world that Das creates is beautiful, harsh and so intriguing. THE DEVOURERS has found a permanent spot on my bookshelf.