The Devourers: A Novel - Softcover

Das, Indra

 
9781101967539: The Devourers: A Novel
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1101967536 ISBN 13: 9781101967539
Verlag: Random House Worlds, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

For readers of Neil Gaiman, Margaret Atwood, China Miéville, and David Mitchell comes a striking debut novel by a storyteller of keen insight and captivating imagination.

LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD WINNER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST

On a cool evening in Kolkata, India, beneath a full moon, as the whirling rhythms of traveling musicians fill the night, college professor Alok encounters a mysterious stranger with a bizarre confession and an extraordinary story. Tantalized by the man’s unfinished tale, Alok will do anything to hear its completion. So Alok agrees, at the stranger’s behest, to transcribe a collection of battered notebooks, weathered parchments, and once-living skins.

From these documents spills the chronicle of a race of people at once more than human yet kin to beasts, ruled by instincts and desires blood-deep and ages-old. The tale features a rough wanderer in seventeenth-century Mughal India who finds himself irrevocably drawn to a defiant woman—and destined to be torn asunder by two clashing worlds. With every passing chapter of beauty and brutality, Alok’s interest in the stranger grows and evolves into something darker and more urgent.

Shifting dreamlike between present and past with intoxicating language, visceral action, compelling characters, and stark emotion, The Devourers offers a reading experience quite unlike any other novel.

Praise for The Devourers

“A chilling, gorgeous saga that spans several centuries and many lands . . . The all-too-human characters—including the nonhuman ones—and the dreamlike, recursive plot serve to entrance the reader. . . . There’s no escaping The Devourers. Readers will savor every bite.”—N. K. Jemisin, The New York Times Book Review

“The Devourers is beautiful. It is brutal. It is violent and vicious. . . . [It] also showcases Das’s incredible prowess with language and rhythm, and his ability to weave folklore and ancient legend with modern day loneliness.”—Tordotcom

“A wholly original, primal tale of love, violence, and transformation.”—Pierce Brown, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Red Rising Trilogy

“Astonishing . . . a narrative that takes possession of you and pulls you along in its wake.”—M. R. Carey, author of The Girl with All the Gifts

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Indra Das is an Octavia E. Butler Scholar and graduate of the 2012 Clarion West Writers Workshop. He completed his MFA at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, where he wore many hats, including freelance editor, writing tutor, occasional illustrator, environmental newswriter, and dog-hotel night-shift attendant. His short fiction has been published in many fiction magazines and anthologies. The Devourers is his first published novel. He divides his time between India and North America and is hard at work on his next novel.

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1

My part in this story began the winter before winters started getting warmer, on a full-­moon night so bright you could see your own shadow on an unlit rooftop. It was under that moon—­slightly smudged by December mist clinging to the streets of Kolkata—­that I met a man who told me he was half werewolf. He said this to me as if it were no different from being half Bengali, half Punjabi, half Parsi. Half werewolf under a full moon. Not the most subtle kind of irony, but a necessary one, if I’m to value the veracity of my recollections.

To set the stage, I must tell you where I was.

Think of a field breathing the cool of nighttime into the soles of your shoes. A large tent in front of you—­cloth, canvas, and bamboo—­lit from within. Electric lamps surrounding a wooden stage that creaks under the bare feet of bright-­robed minstrels. This tent is where the rural bards of Bengal, the bauls, gather every winter to make music for city people. It’s raw music, at times both shrill and hoarse, stained with hashish smoke and the self-­proclaimed madness of their sect. A celebration of what’s been lost, under the vigil of orange-­eyed streetlights.

I am there, that night.

Outside in the cold, in Shaktigarh Math, a city park. I watch the bauls and their audience through the fabric of the tent. Shadows flit across as they clap and cheer. The crowd extends outside, faces lit by cigarettes and spliffs. Hand-­rolled cigarette between my fingers, grass under my shoes. A stranger walks up and stands beside me. The street dogs are gathering by the field, their eyes hungry. It’s one in the morning.

“Afraid to go inside?” the stranger asks. “They may be mad, but they won’t bite.”

He’s talking about the bauls. I laugh dutifully. I’m afraid he wants a smoke, having seen my tin of cigarettes. I don’t want to share; I rolled them very carefully. I tell him I prefer the night air to the tent, not thinking to bring up the fact that there’s no smoking allowed within. I ask what he’s doing outside.

“The music’s a little too shrill for my ears. I can appreciate it just fine from here.” His voice is gentle, his words unhurried.

He takes out his own hash joint. I glance sideways at him as he lights up. The flame illuminates a slender face, its glow running along hairless skin and brushing against the lines of shadow that hug his high cheekbones. I’m disarmed by his androgynous beauty before he even tells his secret.

“I’m a werewolf,” he says. Smoke flares out of his mouth in curls that wreathe his long black hair, giving him silver-­blue locks for a passing second. I don’t see him throw away the match, but his foot moves to rub it into the soil. He’s wearing wicker sandals. Dark flecks of dirt hide under unclipped nails on the ends of his long toes. Apparently the cold doesn’t bother him enough for socks or shoes.

Now, I wish I could tell you this man looks wolfish, that he has a hint of green glinting in his eyes, that his eyebrows meet right above his nose, that his palms have a scattering of hair that tickles my own palms as we shake hands, that his sideburns are thick and shaggy and silvered as the bark of a snow-­dusted birch at gray dawn. But I’m not here to make things up.

“Need a light?” he asks, and I’m startled to find a new flame between his fingers, the hiss of the struck match reaching my ears like an afterthought. Afraid that I’ve been caught staring at his dirty toes and beautiful face, I nod, even though there’s a lighter in my breast pocket. He touches the flame to my cigarette.

“You heard right,” he says, tossing the match. “Well, I’m actually half werewolf. But you heard right.”

“I didn’t ask if I’d heard right.”

“You were thinking it, though,” he says with a smile.

“I wasn’t, actually. I can hear just fine,” I assure him. He keeps smiling. I get embarrassed.

“Thanks for the light,” I say with a cough. My lungs burn from too enthusiastic a first drag. “I suppose I shouldn’t be boasting about my hearing. Wolves have great hearing, right?”

“I’m not a wolf. And yes, they do.”

“There aren’t any wolves near Kolkata. Are there? They’re probably extinct in India.”

“Just because you don’t see them doesn’t mean they’re not there,” he says. I observe that his fingernails are as long as his toenails, and as dirty. Little black sickles hiding under them. I nod, light-­headed from the nicotine rush.

“I’ve seen jackals in the golf greens at Tolly Club.”

He doesn’t say anything. I feel compelled to keep talking.

“My parents have a house. Like a weekend getaway. Outside the city, in Baniban. The caretakers there used to scare me when I was a boy, with stories about wildcats from the woods stealing their chickens. Now that you mention it, there might have been a wolf visit. I never really believed any of those stories. They scared me, though. I never even saw any of those animals. Except a snake, once.” A true story. I still remember the gray coils of the serpent lying there by the flowerpots; it had been beaten to death by the help. They said it was venomous, though I certainly couldn’t tell.

“You’re not afraid of talking to strangers. I like that,” he says, swaying slightly now to the rising call of the bauls’ voices.

I feel shy now, which is absurd. “What’s your other half, then? Human? Aren’t all werewolves half human?” I ask him.

He picks a bit of tobacco out of his teeth, which I don’t think I’ve ever seen a smoker actually do. Spittle clicks between his fingertips and his tongue. “Family history can be a tedious business. Though family isn’t quite the right word.”

And that’s all he says. For someone who clearly wants to talk to me, he says very little.

“When did you find out you were a . . . a half werewolf?”

He shrugs. “I’ve been one all my life. Before we were called werewolves, really.”

“What’s it like?” I ask, the questions flowing from my smoke-­soured mouth. I can’t think of anything more awkward at this moment than standing beside this man and not responding to what he’s just said to me.

“You’ve seen the movies. I am master of my fortune. The moon is my mistress.”

“And cliché is your cabaret?” I ask. Intoxicated disbelief dulls me into self-­deprecation. I analyze my words, which seem nonsensical. I look around, checking to make sure the others standing around us in the field are still there, to run my eyes over the streaks of their shadows. The rhythm of the music snarls to the throb of light and shadow behind the walls of the tent.

He doesn’t growl at me. “Are you an English professor, by any chance?”

“No. But close. I am a professor. Of history, actually. Started teaching a couple of years ago.”

His shapely eyebrows rise. “History? Tales. The weaving of words. A favorite discipline of mine. I congratulate you on your choice of profession, young though you seem for such an endeavor. To tell stories of the past to children who walk into the future is a task both noble and taxing.” I feel a mix of resentment and pleasure from being called young by someone who looks younger than me.

“Well,...

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Verlag
Random House Worlds
Erscheinungsdatum
2017
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1101967536
ISBN 13 
9781101967539
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
320
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

Friedensallee 273
Hamburg
22763
Deutschland

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