Reviews

“None of this gets to the heart of Ridley's questioning. The true heart is a sort of infinite regression. How many monsters? Where did they come from? The world of monsters exists beneath the human world. What is the world beneath that? Or the world above? The heart of the question is the fear of infinite unknowns, descending forever, turtles all the way down. Places to hide and places hidden. The universe has legs.”

TITLE—We Are the Crisis

SERIES—Book Two in the Convergence Saga

AUTHOR—Cadwell Turnbull

PUBLISHED—Nov 2023

PUBLISHER—Blackstone

GENRE—speculative fiction/sci-fi/fantasy

SETTING—our world/s, & others

MAIN THEMES/SUBJECTS—monsters (vampires, werewolves, woo-woos, soucouyants, witches, dragons, seers, shapeshifters, mind-readers, universe walkers), gods, multiverses, marginalization, fear-motivated policy, racism & hate-crimes, agency & autonomy, love & interpersonal relationships, community support & solidarity, co-ops & collective economy theory, responsibility of creation, surveillance ethics, secret societies, fictionalized historical figures, a-chronological/four-dimensional storytelling

“This power is the one that frightens me the most, for how easily it can get to the heart of other people, their most primal motivations. It is always fear. Sometimes it also contains a bit of love.”

Summary:

This is book two in the Convergence Saga by Cadwell Turnbull—book one was NO GODS NO MONSTERS.

My thoughts:

What to say about book two. What a wild, thought-provoking, & beautiful ride! I loved how much deeper into the world we got. I loved all the extra details, character interiority, worldbuilding, philosophy, politics, explorations of monster theory & solidarity & the nature of universes… I loved seeing Dragon’s character develop more & I loved the new character of Alex.

Thanks to my reading group I feel like I have a good handle on plot, themes, & the world except for like a few things related to the nature of some characters’ magic & how exactly the universes function but I am totally fine with not having all the answers as there is still a third book to come that I trust will expand & clarify a lot of the gaps in my understanding.

I was also really intrigued to hear Turnbull say in his author interview with @sistahscifi that all of his writing is interconnected & more or less takes place in the same “world” or “universe” (as much as any of his stories can be confined by terms like “worlds” & “universes”) so I think I’m going to see if I can go through the whole oeuvre, reading his short stories, articles, & essays linked on his author website as well as rereading THE LESSON & books one & two of the Saga before coming to book three. Especially since his larger themes & deeper philosophy is my favorite thing about his writing.

I would recommend this book to readers who like challenging reads & are ok with not fully knowing what is going on at any one point in the story. 😁 This book is best read in community. In fact, I highly recommend joining in with the rest of the Cadwell Turnbull Readalong crew on IG because it really helps to work through all the different plots, universes, characters, motivations, secret societies, alternate histories, etc. etc. as a group because yeah it’s veryyy complex. (Then you get to enjoy my weeks-late questions after something everyone has already discussed only just clicks in my brain. 😆)

“…I can feel the darkness waiting just outside the light, and it feels deeper, like a shroud. I find myself praying that the lights don't go out. I pray that the darkness doesn't consume us.”

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

CW // body gore, hatecrimes, bombings, torture, death of loved ones, (Please feel free to DM me for more specifics!)

Season: Fall or Winter

Music pairing: apparently there is a playlist on Spotify somewhere but I haven’t been able to find it. 🫣 Please lmk if any of y’all have the link to it!

Further Reading—

The Stolen Heir duology by Holly Black
Ursula K Leguin—TBR
LOTE by Shola von Reinhold
FLEDGLING by Octavia Butler
Milan Kundera (UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS & IMMORTALITY)
True Blood (2008, tv drama series)—TBW
P Djèlí Clark
The Legendborn Cycle by Tracy Deonn

Syllabus:

PLAYING IN THE DARK by Toni Morrison
THE DARK FANTASTIC by Ebony Elizabeth Thomas
MONSTER THEORY by Jeffrey Cohen
THE PHILOSOPHY OF HORROR Noël Carroll
SKIN THIEF by Suzan Palumbo
COLLECTIVE COURAGE by Jessica Gordon Nembhard
EXPERIMENTS IN IMAGINING OTHERWISE by Lola Olufemi
THE UNDERCOMMONS: FUGITIVE PLANNING & BLACK STUDY by Fred Moten & Stefano Harney
WORMWOOD STAR: THE MAGICKAL LIFE OF MARJORIE CAMERON by Spencer Kansa
THE MARVELLOUS EQUATIONS OF THE DREAD by Marcia Douglas
FINNA by Nino Cipri

Favorite Quotes—

“She imagines the history of monsters as a type of ongoing guerrilla warfare. There's an advantage in the haziness of the shadow world. It could be hundreds of monsters, or thousands, or millions. A useful degree of uncertainty. And now, with the world as it is, they need that murkiness even more.”

“Sure, she grew up in a sort of backwoods, but Rebecca doesn't trust other people's.”

word.

“But mobilization takes risk. Someone has to take that on.”

“Not for the first time, he feels a pang of sadness for what they've all lost. Not just their work but their sense of security in the universe, even if it was false.”

“Is it anger Ridley feels? He isn't sure. A little fear, but alarmingly less than he thinks he should be feeling. To be alarmed at not being afraid enough—what a thing! Will he someday not even feel alarm? Would something else replace it?”

“To the marginalized, a response like this isn't surprising. People are comfortable denying the existence of things that frighten them, and when they can't, they're perfectly fine not talking about them.”

“Most of the books are obviously bullshit-fabulist stories that don't match Rebecca's experience at all.

But there are a smaller number that slip into a nebulous space.”

👀

"If you stopped me, I was worried something worse might happen. If a person is being guided toward something, they re also being guided away from something else."

“Marjorie Cameron grew up strange. Even at a young age, she had that mystical quality about her, this beautiful and horrifying closeness to the edges of reality. She would lie awake at night and imagine Death just outside her window, dragging his scythe behind him. In winter, the trees around her house looked like the skeletal fingers of colossi sprouting from the earth. At school, she excelled in art and staring out windows. Boys thought she was cute, but they didn't linger; something about her scared them off. Girls thought she was odd, but she managed to keep acquaintances. Nothing particularly damaging happened to her at school. She endured no cruelties, had no rivals. She was that friend who danced in the orbits of many groups, coming in to see what was happening before moving on, a comet’s tail streaming out behind her as she left the solar system. She would return, predictably—always—but people learned not to expect much from her beyond her regular appearances.”

Am I… am I Marjorie Cameron?

“‘They said they don't want any books,’ she says.

‘Oh, they'll get books. And they better read them this time.’”

“He has dead eyes. Not unreadable eyes, or even evil eyes. No, they turn her stomach in a specific way. He is without concern for good or evil, which is worse than anything.”

“Magic can make monsters. Magic itself is monstrous. A lie received can be transmuted into fact. What is the world if that can be true? Where are its limits?”

“Alex would eventually come to know that vampires weren't soulless and that she had to unlearn a lot of other nonsense she had picked up from watching films and reading books. It was their priority that had changed. The blood supersedes everything. Other instincts—other emotions, like love—come second. She really was her mother, really did love her. But other priorities were competing for limited space at the moment. How long did her mother wrestle before killing her father? How long did it take for the hunger to win out?”

"You think you're the vulnerable ones here," Ridley says. "But you're not. She is. Rebecca has revealed herself to a room full of people here without knowing what is in any of your hearts. I know this isn't the appropriate way to do things. But we're desperate. We've been trying to understand what's happening around us, but we need help. The known world is terrifying, but there are rumblings coming from places we don't know. We need support. And visibility. I'm sorry."

“Set a person well on their path, and they'll follow through on sheer inertia.”

on the effectiveness of sociocultural expectations—i.e. why ppl uncritically subscribe to monogamy, get married, have children, fulfill gender roles, claim certain identities, etc.

“Matthew admires her pragmatism, her ability to see change through a long lens. He is too impatient for that. He doesn't feel it in his bones. He understands urgency, understands that human beings have so little time to accomplish their many goals. Maybe that is where the difference comes from. Sondra is human, and something more.”

👀

“These are scary times, but she's managed to carve out a small corner of sanity within them.”

"I don't let my idealism convince me that a mountain is just a hill. Reality doesn't change because you're hopeful."

"Power," Sondra said, "is almost always negotiated unless your life is on the line. The powers that be, the ones that run the country we consider our owner, the laws that hold the whole sprawling mess together, form a landscape if you can see it. An obstacle is a hill, a log, a flowing stream. An impasse is a mountain, an ocean. All these intersecting systems are the topography of the intangible contract that binds the world. Pretending a mountain is a river you can swim across will only give you a concussion. It isn't about who has power over you. I's about how you navigate the landscape of power. That simple reconceptualization has saved me a lot of headaches. Building the means of moving along a landscape, learning how the wind turns or when a storm is coming—all those individual actions develop a keenness, a sense of who you are. What's you, and what's geography. It expunges one's shame over not leveling a mountain that need only be climbed."

"There's no armor big enough to save any of us," she says.

"Why did I do it? Because I knew someone was suffering in that basement. I knew but didn't want to know, so I convinced myself I didn't. Nothing can right that. But I could do this one right thing. And I realized that these were not the people I wanted to spend the rest of my life knowing."

“Don't let how you've been in the past give you an excuse not to change.”

“Never break cover. Never blink. Trust your instincts. Trust your luck.”

“—they would inevitably trace the path to their present and find all sorts of implausible coincidences and moments of chaotic fortune that would make most people want to believe in a god or some cosmic force that favored them specifically.”