No Gods, No Monsters - Cadwell Turnbull
- Publisher – Titan Books
- Published – Out Now
- Price – £9.99 paperback | £4.68 Kindle
Cadwell Turnbull's We Are The Crisis is on this years Ignyte Awards ballot for best novel, and with it being the second in a series I thought I should probably read the first before I tackled it. It being urban fantasy, and that being a genre I traditionally don't really enjoy, I didn't have high hopes going into this. But I actually found myself pleasantly surprised by it. Here's the blurb:
Magic and monsters collide in this beautifully crafted, powerful, intense tale told through the voices of a diverse and rich cast of characters. An unforgettable novel from a rising star in fantasy fiction.
One October morning, Laina gets the news that her brother has been shot and killed by Boston cops. But what looks like a case of police brutality soon reveals something much stranger. Monsters are real. And they want everyone to know it.
As creatures from myth and legend come out of the shadows, seeking safety through visibility, their emergence sets off a chain of seemingly unrelated events. Members of a local werewolf pack are threatened into silence. A professor follows a missing friend’s trail of breadcrumbs to a mysterious secret society. And a young boy with unique abilities seeks refuge in a pro-monster organization with secrets of its own. Meanwhile, more people start disappearing, suicides and hate crimes increase, and protests erupt globally, both for and against the monsters.
At the center is a mystery no one thinks to ask: Why now? What has frightened the monsters out of the dark?
The world will soon find out.
Initially I was hooked, and hooked hard. The opening of the book is strong, Turnbull's prose is great, and this didn't really feel like any other urban fantasy that I've read before. I often think of werewolves as being part of the "big three" of classic horror monsters alongside vampires and zombies, and I regularly lament the fact that they're a little overlooked in fiction and cinema compared to the other two. Urban fiction as a genre loves werewolves, and I really like them in theory, so when this looked to be a werewolf book and I was enjoying it I thought that maybe I'd finally found an urban fantasy series I could love.
There was never a point in the book when I wanted to stop reading, but I definitely became less fond of it as time went on. That mainly coincided with the emergence of more of the standard tropes of the genre becoming present in the book - lots of different kinds of monsters outside of the werewolves that open the books, secret societies of magicians, etc. This isn't a criticism of the book at all, it's just the case that these are things about the genre I don't tend to enjoy and that despite how much there is to like here, this ultimately wasn't for me.
This definitely feels like it's trying to take the genre in a different direction to its contemporaries, and I applaud that. There are parts of this novel that are fantastic. I really liked the framing devise of the observer, a character who's never really given any explanation and who exists almost as a stand-in for the reader and whose eyes we see everything through, and the rest of the characters are equally strong and compelling.
Structurally this does some interesting things, starting with an event and jumping forward weeks and months at a time to show us how the world responds to it from the point of view of different characters who all sort of overlap and interact with each other but also don't, really. This was an interesting way of telling the story but, for me, it ended up making everything feel a little disjointed and disconnected. I never found myself with any full understanding of what was happening outside of the small scraps of individual stories we get, and I couldn't really find any significance in anything.
I suspect that a lot of this novel is spending time setting up things that will pay off in book two, but I'm not sure there was enough here to make this work on its own merits for me. Especially looking at the blurb now (which I didn't before reading it), I don't feel like the book really answers any of the questions the blurb asks.
On finishing No Gods, No Monsters I find myself conflicted. I certainly didn't dislike it, but I know that were the sequel not on the Ignyte list I wouldn't have any desire to read it. At the time of writing this post I don't actually know if I'm going to read We Are The Crisis or not, but I think that if I do it will be out of a sense of obligation to attempt all of the books on the list before I vote rather than out of a genuine desire to carry on reading these books. Turnbull's writing is good, and his debut novel The Lesson sounds like something I'll really enjoy and I'm likely going to add it to my reading list, but the Convergence saga just isn't for me.
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