![]() (The title is taken from a slogan of the labor and anarchist movements - "No gods, no masters" - and those words would be right at home in the mouths of many of his characters.) There's the overarching idea of othering those who do not look like us or live like us or love like us, and the terrible consequences of both hiding our secrets and revealing them. There's race and sexuality and class and collectivism. The thing that's buried deep, deep in the heart of this difficult book and speaks loudest to this moment and our reality is the idea that most people, most of the time, will gladly claim that monsters and magic are not in fact real even when they see them with their own eyes. They balance havoc and haircuts, budget meetings and Old Gods. It is both beautifully fantastical and wondrously mundane as each of Turnbull's sharply detailed characters work through (or don't) both the enormity of regular life and the parallel enormity of the Fracture. The story loops and swerves, bouncing from an anarchist bookstore to a collective peanut farm to a commune in the Virgin Islands to the streets of Boston and New York, small towns and secret hideouts. There's Laina, her asexual, trans husband Ridley, Laina's girlfriend Rebecca (who knew Lincoln), the frustrated, divorced academic who falls down a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories and secret societies, a child called Dragon, an invisible woman, a senator from St. He focuses on characters - breaking the novel into sections, each following a different person, all of whom are connected in one way or another, most of whom are still reeling even months after "the Fracture" - which has become the name given to the moment that the monsters were revealed to the world by pop science and TV pundits. Turnbull posits this world and gives us the barest hints of its dimensions. All messy, weird and arcane barely understood even by those who use it dangerous to all involved. It is all pain, violence and bloody sacrifice. It is practiced by powerful people and secret societies with strange names and histories that stretch back generations. ![]() Especially when, not long after, a pack of a dozen werewolves show up in the middle of a busy street, stop traffic, and transform in full view of the public and a million cell phone cameras.īook Reviews You'll Never Look At Your 'Good Neighbors' The Same Way Again The world reacts the way the world does - with panic, hate crimes, witch burnings, madness. ![]() Everyone in the world sees it - sees her brother, the wolf, attacking a Boston cop, the cop shooting, her brother lying naked and dead in the street, transformed back into a man. But when Lincoln's sister, Laina, is mysteriously offered a copy of suppressed police bodycam footage of the shooting, it becomes a whole different kind of story.īecause Laina's brother was a werewolf. Not the sort of man the community rallies around, Turnbull tells us. The man, Lincoln, had been addicted to drugs, estranged from his family, living on the street. You'd do nothing.Īfter that, it's about the police shooting and killing an unarmed Black man and leaving him to die in the street. What would you do if monsters were real? Cadwell Turnbull knows exactly what you'd do. A cold drop into the complicated life of a man we do not know and who, almost as soon as we meet him, is left behind. It begins with a goodbye - a first-person lead-in about walking away, about going home, from a character who becomes the eyes, ears, occasional tongue, of an omniscient, invisible narrator relaying to us everything that follows. ![]() ![]() Possibilities scattered like pennies on the ground.Īnd I'm not saying the surface is any walk in the park either. Once you dig in and start thinking about it maybe more than you meant to. His new book, No Gods, No Monsters (the first in a series with extraordinary potential) is a terrible gut-punch of a thing once you get past the surface. I mean, what would you do if a global pandemic was real? What would you do if the millions of dead were real? What would you do if American fascism was real?Ĭadwell Turnbull knows exactly what you'd do. If the last several years have taught us anything, it's that our actual reactions to things are not always (or ever) what we imagine they might be. ![]()
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