No Gods, No Monsters
There are several ways in which a novel can feel modern: an unconventional or groundbreaking style, timely themes or subject matter, contemporary setting, brisk pacing, living characters (figuratively but also, perhaps, famous ones) or any number of combinations of those or other characteristics. The point of such a novel (or any novel regardless of its setting) is to capture a moment, namely the present one. The best novels, however, feel modern no matter the time in which they are set; they feel immediate and timeless like the themes have never and will never go away.
Cadwell Turnbull’s No Gods No Monsters is a timeless novel of the present. There’s an unconventional narrative structure with a pseudo-omniscient narrator. There’s a tightly plotted story churning forward at a sustained clip. There are characters that are analogs of famous living people. There are also characters that were once living, but not so long ago that they’ve fallen out of the collective consciousness. There are even timely pop-cultural references for music fans (FKA Twigs!), nerds (X-Men!), and Black people (Blue Magic!). But any number of novels have those elements, are modern, and are not remarkable. What makes No Gods No Monsters remarkable is the seamless integration of those elements.
The story concerns the fallout from “The Fracture”, the moment when a viral video of a police shooting reveals to the world that monsters exist, they have and do walk among us. There’s an easy parallel between the beings labeled “monsters” for being different (to be clear: they are very different; some of them turn into wolves, others suck blood or eat limbs) and the groups of people marginalized in our reality. Turnbull doesn’t shy away from this allegory, but he also doesn’t lean on it.
The world of No Gods No Monsters is made in our image. There are Black and brown people, white people, trans people, gay people, old people, poor people, politicians, capitalists, communists, pundits, and academics. There is a protest and a public shooting. There is a message board and there are conspiracy theories and secret societies both fictional and real. There’s all of the mess and chaos of modern life, the exact thing you wish to avoid when you can’t help but open whatever app on your phone each morning. It’s all packed in there and yet Turnbull’s magic is that the book doesn’t feel stuffy or disjointed. He manages to corral all of the chaos of the here and now and distill it into a few hundred pages while also fleshing out a fictional world.
Like the storytelling, the prose is similarly efficient, compact, and clear. It is a novel without wasted space. On any random page, there are passages worthy of highlighting. One such passage is told from the point of view of a monster, Dragon, who has been rescued from one secret society, the Order of Zsouvox, by its seemingly benevolent rival, the Order of Asha:
Fear keeps Dragon nailed to the spot. He listens through the door but hears nothing inside. He doesn’t dare try the knob again. The house takes a breath and holds it, all sound disappearing into the silence. The shadow stretches out, grows darker, deeper. The silence and the darkness of the moment remind him of late nights underground. For the first time, he wonders about the dangers of this new place.
Nothing is overstated but Dragon’s dilemma is made clear. After being taken away from the Order of Zsouvox, Dragon is finally experiencing fear, an emotion he thought he was rid of. The potential for danger had been there the whole time but he is only now becoming aware. In this way he’s not unlike those in the novel who learn that monsters have been living among them their entire lives. Some of them choose to accept this new reality while others remain willfully ignorant, deciding that the original viral video had been a hoax after all copies of it are edited or taken out of circulation. People are unable or unwilling to distinguish the real from the fake in the avalanche of misinformation that drowns out credible sense. In the end they go on believing what they want to believe, whatever it is that makes them most comfortable. This is true for any number of issues – from climate change to Covid-19. There’s so much happening these days (and days to come and days past) that it is easier to shut one’s eyes and ignore it, but of course that will only work for so long as Ridley, a reluctant monster ally, learns towards the end of the novel:
All he has seen, all those nightmare-filled nights, and he still wants to be polite. And the words feel impolite somehow — an intrusion on everyone’s comfort and euphoria, an unwelcome dose of ugly reality…All of them, Ridley included, were just perfectly willing to pretend it wasn’t happening, as if by consensus alone they could wish the reality away.
But there is no wishing reality away. The moment is here and all we can do is deal with it as best we can.
