The Devourers
By Indra Das

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Characters

• Alok: first narrator; college professor
• Stranger/Izrail: werewolf
• Cyrah: human woman
• Fenrir: werewolf (Norse)
• Gévaudan: werewolf (French)
• Assorted other rakshasas and khrissals

(location references are to the Kindle edition)

Questions

1. Did you read the book? Did you like it?
2. Why does Izrail want to tell Alok his stories?
3. Are there echoes of colonialism in the three European werewolves coming to India, or is that too shallow a reading?
4. What do you think about the close relationship that develops between Cyrah and Gevaudan? How does it come about? (see loc. 3048)
5. Why does Fenrir want to create a child with a human despite his culture’s fierce opposition?
6. Why is Fenrir so interested in the human experience and human emotions (loc. 792)? Wasn’t he once human himself?
7. What was your reaction to the rape scene and how the author wove it into the overall story? Your thoughts about how Cyrah reacts to it (eg, loc. 3039)?
8. What did you think of Cyrah as a character? Why does she seek out Fenrir after the rape?
9. Talk about the scene between Alok, Izrail, and the three men by the river (loc. 2738). Why does the author depict such an ordinary yet threatening event?
10. This is a very visceral novel--piss, spit, blood, semen, etc.--yet beautifully written. How does that viscerality relate to the larger themes in the novel?
11. When the werewolves feed, the human soul appears to live in them (in some fashion) after the destruction of the body. What do you make of this?
12. Why does Cyrah give her child to be raised by the werewolves?
13. What did you make of Alok’s ending and the final sequence of the book?
14. What did you think of the blurring between characters as they narrate their experiences of each other’s lives?