SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: No Gods No Monsters by Cadwell Turnbull

 

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: No Gods No Monsters by Cadwell Turnbull: https://t.co/dXhNckPJtl

Short Review: 9 out of 10
1/3

— Josh (garik16) (@garik16) August 25, 2021

Short Review (cont): A short novel filled with individual character stories dealing with themes of race, family, police violence, and solidarity as a hidden world of monsters is revealed to the public, changing both those hidden together and those hidden alone forever.
2/3

— Josh (garik16) (@garik16) August 25, 2021

Full Disclosure:  This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on September 7, 2021 in exchange for a potential review.  I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.


No Gods No Monsters is a scifi/fantasy novel by author Cadwell Turnbell, and the first novel in a longer series listed online as the Convergence Saga.  The novel is really short - Amazon lists it as 330 pages, but digitally the length is equivalent to what I tend to think of as around 200 pages - but it is absolutely filled with ideas and characters.  In a similar setup to quite a few other books, Turnbull creates a world (and more than one world) that is like ours, except that monsters/supernatural beings (werewolves/seers/witches, etc) have lived in the shadows for generations....until a sudden event brings the out into the open. 

But Turnbull does especially well in No Gods No Monsters, and what makes this book something special, is that he uses this world to deal with issues of race, of family, of police and gun violence, and of solidarity between peoples who may not be similar except in how they are in danger from the larger world.  The novel is told in a very nonlinear and sometimes disorienting fashion, jumping from character to character in various places and subplots that feel disconnected for large stretches, but the characters are all done so really well that it mostly comes together in the end to something that hits hard.  It still is unfortunately only book 1 in a series though, and the book feels like it, with so many plot threads not coming together here, but the characters and themes have me eagerly anticipating book 2.  
-----------------------------------------------------Plot Summary------------------------------------------------------
When Laina gets the word that her brother was shot and killed by the cops, she doesn't know what to think, having not seen her brother in years after he spiraled into addiction.  Laina has an urge to know what really happened, an urge answered by a mysterious voice coming from nowhere, which leaves her with a strange video that is soon leaked to police - of her brother being a wolf when he was shot, before transforming back into his human form.  Soon it becomes apparent that werewolves like her brother, and the girl who follows him to Laina, are only the tip of the iceberg of what is out there: "monsters" are real, and have always been.

But it soon becomes clear that there are secret societies out there made up with or dealing with the monsters, at least one of which seems determined to put the genie back in the bottle by magically erasing the video evidence....and by taking more drastic measures.  But the reveal of the reality of monsters can't be easily forgotten, and sprouts prejudice and hate, and soon those monsters and monster-adjacent people living in secret solidarity find themselves in the crosshairs of these societies and their mysterious goals.  

And for these people, for a man who can see it all happening through their minds, nothing will ever be the same.
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No Gods No Monsters is a hard book to explain or talk about, because the story is told in a fashion that is extremely uninterested in making it clear to the reader what's going necessarily going on, or what the overarching plot is.  The book is written with a framing device as being told by a man returning to St. Thomas some time after the death of his brother, and occasionally returns to the story of this man (Cal) as he interacts with his brother's daughter.  But the framing device is not isolated from the rest of the story, and so Cal's first person view occasionally pops up within the stories he is telling, with him clearly having more of a role - and a presence - somewhere within these stories, a presence that a few characters can seemingly see and interact with, which just adds to the mystery of it all.  

But most of this book takes place in these stories, which follow one of several really well developed and interesting (and largely LGBTQ and PoC) characters in a world turned upside down by the appearance of "monsters".  It starts with Laina, the girl I mentioned in the summary above, whose brother Lincoln's turns out to have been a werewolf before he was shot and killed by police.  Then there's Rebecca, another werewolf and member of Lincoln's pack, who gets into a relationship with Laina and struggles to deal with several members of her pack getting scared away by threats.  Then there's Ridley, Laina's husband (who's trans male and ace), who runs a cooperative bookstore and focuses on more socialist organizing, to the disappointment of his parents.  

And then there are the other characters who are affiliated with one of the two cults/secret societies that deal with monsters, such as Dragon, a young boy raised by the splinter Cult of the Zsouvox for some clearly terrible purpose, who is rescued by the other organization, and just wants to do good and be himself.  There's Sondra, a young senator in St. Thomas who is from a family of woo-woos, dog shifters with the ability to smell other monsters/beings of the supernatural, who cares for her invisible adopted sister, the blood-drinking Sonya and helps Sonya's faction, the Order of Asha, reluctantly, and wonders what happened to her missing parents.  And all of the named characters above are just the point of view characters - there a whole bunch of supernatural and non-supernatural other characters who are well built and really interesting parts of this book that I don't really have time to mention here. 

These characters are all really well developed despite the short page length of this novel, and it allows the plot, which is sprawling all over the place until the end, when the major characters all converge on a rally in support of the monsters, to hit some really interesting themes - themes of prejudice, of police brutality, of horrifying lethal mistakes, of solidarity between peoples with different interests, of love and blood relation, etc.  It's about the cost of obsession, the impacts of choices that one regrets, and issues of free will vs destiny and more.  Like I mentioned above, the book is far more interested in exploring these themes and its characters that forming a single cohesive plot, although it starts to make moves towards that end in the final few chapters.  

Really that's the one weakness of this book - while it drew me in and kept me reading eagerly throughout, it isn't long enough to really pay off all of its plot threads, most of which it keeps open and mysterious for the next book in this series.  It isn't a dealbreaker here, because the characters and themes explored here are so interesting, with a lot happening in the climax, that I'm not left feeling wholly unsatisfied by the result....but at the same time, it feels kind of like we missed out on a lot of what was being built towards.  

So it's got first book problems, but other than that, it's really good, and well well worth your time - it won't take you long to read, but it will stick with you quite a lot.