A review by swallowthemoons
No Gods, No Monsters by Cadwell Turnbull

3.0

 No Gods, No Monsters is the kind of book that doesn’t hand itself to you easily. It asks to be felt before it’s understood, if understanding is even the point. Cadwell Turnbull’s second book is strange, fragmented, often beautifully written, and undeniably ambitious, but for all its scope and complexity, I found myself more distanced than immersed. I admire what it’s doing on a conceptual level, but as a reading experience, it left me conflicted.

The story begins with a sharp, devastating hook: Laina’s brother is killed by police, in what initially seems like yet another act of brutal injustice. But the video goes viral and reveals something else entirely. Her brother was a werewolf. Monsters are real, they’ve been hiding in plain sight, and they are done with hiding. The revelation sparks marches, resistance, erasure, and chaos. The video disappears. Collective memory dissolves. It’s a powerful premise, and for a while, it carries the novel forward with real urgency.

But the deeper I went, the harder it was to stay grounded. No Gods, No Monsters sprawls across timelines, perspectives, and dimensions, introducing a large cast of characters, some vivid and compelling, others elusive and half-formed. The structure is slippery by design, but often confusing for the sake of being confusing. And while I respect ambiguity, I kept waiting for the threads to tighten, and they never quite did.

There’s a lot here to appreciate. This is urban fantasy filtered through a deeply literary lens. It's not concerned with traditional worldbuilding or exposition. There are werewolves, dragons, cults, and secret societies, but they exist more as metaphors than mechanics. The monsters, if it isn’t clear, are us. Or rather, they are the people who have been historically labeled monstrous, queer people, Black people, trans people, disabled people. The “monster” becomes a stand-in for marginalization, for otherness, for all the ways society tries to erase what it cannot assimilate. Turnbull does not flatten this metaphor into simplicity. The cast is richly intersectional: queer polyamorous relationships, ace and trans representation, characters with mental illness, with trauma, with cultural inheritances they don’t fully understand. The violence of systemic oppression, the erasure of memory, the terror of being known, it’s all present and powerfully rendered in certain moments.

Still, I can’t say this book entirely worked for me. The scope is so wide that it often loses itself. Somewhere along the way, I stopped feeling emotionally connected. The plot, such as it is, resists resolution. I understand that ambiguity is the point, but I sometimes longed for more emotional clarity, more weight in the connections between characters. There’s so much potential here, so many rich ideas and striking passages, but the narrative architecture doesn’t quite support the load. And the shifting narrator, while thematically interesting, often pulled me out of the story instead of deepening it.

Yet I admire this book deeply. It is not perfect, but it’s trying to do something most books won’t even attempt. It explores grief, identity, memory, and erasure with the strange beauty of a dream you only half-remember but can’t stop thinking about. I just wish the emotional resonance had matched the intellectual ambition. This is a book I wanted to love, and while it didn’t quite get there for me, I’m glad I sat with it.

3 out of 5 stars. At its best, it’s thought-provoking and quietly devastating. But more often than not, I felt adrift, wading through fog, hoping for a shape that never fully emerged.