This was inspired by the beautiful Indian writer @IndrasDas and his amazing book #TheDevourers , translated into English and narrated as an audiobook in a Shakespearen-like reading by @ShishirKurup and @MiraSimhan, in a style that makes you feel like you're watching a movie, rather than listening to someone read a book aloud. Between the WAY they read it and the gritty, yet poetic descriptive writing of the author, you'll feel like you've gone for a plunge to the bottom of the ocean; you're so deeply inside the book's world, and you won't want to come up for air til you've finished it. Please, leave all preconceived notions of cliché Western werewolf tropes behind. This story is utterly foreign to those tired-out archetypes. The heroine's bravery will make her your personal hero. The story begins from the POV of the "villian", of sorts, who is self-piting, but don't let that throw you off. That's just a genius way to surprise us when the story switches perspective to Cyrah : a Muslim woman in 1600's India with no family, no home and no income besides what she can make selling her body to pay for her travels. Her encounter with a creature of magic changes her life forever, in ways that are terrible, yet result in her living a life no woman of that time period could have dreamed of, and all down to her own determination. Cyrah's personality raises her above the book's demi-god-like creatures of magic; beings of life and death, of beauty and terror; making her as god-like as they in her short mortal's life. The book explores the true nature of concepts as different as rape, false love, true friendship, and a woman's determination never to be owned, by any man, mortal or otherwise. And even a bit on gender and sexuality. The book is presented to us as a story told to a gay man in (approximately) modern-day India by a mysterious stranger, through his magical and hypnotizing storytelling and through transcripts the stranger supplies the man to type for him. We are plunged from the modern day to centuries earlier, and back, yet it fits. If the art I've made isn't the world's most fervent endorsement, I don't know what is. Read it! Or better yet, treat yourself, and listen to it on audiobook, most especially if, like me, you are unfamiliar with the pronunciations and accents of a 1600's India's names and languages... or ancient France and several other places... I want this young author to get all the credit he so deserves, but that I fear he won't, as his book doesn't fit into any of our traditional Western genres. This book is its own species. Something new. Go for a plung in #TheDevourers and tell me what you think. This picture is called Banbibi (pronounced "in-bee-bee" on the audiobook). This is how I imagined Cyrah, still in her youth, astride her vahana, Gévaudan. I know I captured Cyrah's youth. I hope I also captured her bravery and unshakable determination. As for Gévaudan, I know I've depicted him as frightening, and a little gross, but I hope he also seems beautiful, in the way a tiger might be, if tigers were the size of Buffalo, a bit unhygenic, and waves of heat came off their hides and stream rose from their maws. I fear I have not yet figured out how to do justice to his plumes of orange and purple without obscuring his form so much I end up hitting "undo" and return to this wolfish bison with a warthog's tusks. The author is deliberately vague about all the magical creature's descriptions, giving us just enough to get our imagations scrambling to fill in the rest, our uncertainty about their exact form adding to our fascination for them.
