A RUIN, GREAT AND FREE concludes the Convergence Saga with book 3

A RUIN, GREAT AND FREE (Convergence Saga #3)
CADWELL TURNBULL
Blackstone Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$29.99 hardcover, available now

One of Ancillary Review of Books' 2025 Notable Books!

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From bestselling and award-winning author Cadwell Turnbull comes A Ruin, Great and Free, the stunning conclusion to the popular Convergence Saga.

It has been nearly two years since the anti-monster riots. The inhabitants of Moon have been very fortunate in the intervening months. Inside their hidden monster settlement, they’ve found peace, even as the world outside slips into increasing unrest. Monsters are being hunted everywhere, forced back into the shadows they once tried to escape from. Other secret settlements have offered a place to hide, but how long can this half-measure against fear and hatred last?

Over the course of three days, the inhabitants of Moon are tested. The Black Hand continues to search for them and the Cult of the Zsouvox wants to make Moon the last stand in their war against the Order of Asha. This is more than enough to reckon with, but the gods have also placed their sights on Moon—and they bring with them a conflict that may either save or unravel the universe itself.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Nothin' like uppin' the stakes in the last book in a series!

Not that anything was ever low-stakes here; but after becoming multiversal, adding heavy conflict among the gods afflicting the timelines, and starting from the baseline of shapeshifters being a real, oppressed minority, one can be forgiven for feeling...overwhelmed...in the toils of the complexification.

It's all big fun, though, if the previous volumes and their events are all on board one's mind. (My reviews might help you decide on whether this read will suit you.) As the storyverse has expanded, the stakes have multiplied and the worldbuilding has grown more ornamental than structural. It's to be expected; no one should start reading the series here because the world won't make enough sense to get the novice reader involved.

For the invested reader, Author Turnbull provides narrative guidance to put together the strands of this multiversal concluding chapter. It is complicated; it requires thought and rewards reflection; it does not hide its political stances. Since I am sympathetic to them I have no issue with that. This entire series needed to exist, to feed queer people the visibility of others without being Othered, to explore the world queerness as baseline identity, all are things that needed to be done. But the fight scene between the werebear and the dragon is the main reason Cadwell Turnbull *had* to start writing this series.

As much as I like Author Turnbull's politics, I read fantasy novels seldom...not the biggest fan of the genre, me...and when I do I want to have real fun, some thrills, and a background of worldbuilding that involves my brain in more than the ordinary tropey elves and suchlike. This series has delivered on each of those desires from giddy-up to whoa. The monsters are just plain folks, as is almost always the case when one gets to know the Othered; same desires, interests, needs, and the differences are vanishingly small when seen against the backdrop of greater familiarity. That makes their monsterness feel endearing to me. It becomes the urban-fantasy marker that does not turn off this less than eager fantasy reader.

I'm pretty sure anyone who reads my reviews can figure out why I approve of the queer representation herein.

A gory meditation on how much hatred costs, how misguided it is, and how gods, mages, multiversal Powers all have aims that barely touch our own so contact (let alone involvement) should be avoided. Grief and loss are the lot of all sentient beings; so spread kindness and acceptance, please.

It won't be in this series but I look forward to Cadwell Turnbull's next book.

WE ARE THE CRISIS, Convergence Saga #2 after NO GODS, NO MONSTERS

WE ARE THE CRISIS
CADWELL TURNBULL (Convergence Saga #2)
Blackstone Publishing
$26.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In We Are the Crisis—the second book in the Convergence Saga from award-winning author Cadwell Turnbull—humans and monsters come into conflict in a magical and dangerous world as civil rights collide with preternatural forces.

In this highly anticipated sequel, set a few years after No Gods, No Monsters, humanity continues to grapple with the revelation that supernatural beings exist. A werewolf pack investigates the strange disappearances of former members and ends up unraveling a greater conspiracy, while back on St. Thomas, a hurricane approaches and a political debate over monster’s rights ignites tensions in the local community.

Meanwhile, New Era—a pro-monster activist group—works to build a network between monsters and humans, but their mission is threatened by hate crimes perpetrated by a human-supremacist group known as the Black Hand. And beneath it all two ancient orders escalate their conflict, revealing dangerous secrets about the gods and the very origins of magic in the universe.

Told backward and forward in time as events escalate and unravel, We Are the Crisis is a brilliant contemporary fantasy that takes readers on an immersive and thrilling journey.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I think this series of novels that discuss the sources of Otherness and the artificiality of the idea of a permanent identity deserves all the praise I can heap on it. Using modern culture's delight in cryptids and monsters as real entities, Author Turnbull offers a wise and inclusive look at how identity can be imposed from outside and then used to oppress and persecute the recipient of that imposed "self". Horror fiction is supposed to scare us with the monsters, not FOR them. This subversion of the literary status quo is ideally suited to slide in under the resistant person's radar and make them think again about what a monster is, and who decides what that identity means. This is something that has needed doing since the days of myth...Beowulf is, at the end of the day, about a mother seeking vengeance for the harm done to her child...and what could be more subversive than that?

The very concept of debating rights is absurd on its face. You don't grant rights. Rights are, then they get denied by the controlling elites to serve their own purposes. Granting rights is best framed as removing impediments unjustly placed in the path of those attempting to exercise their natural rights. When that fact comes dangerously close to becoming part of the great mass of people's consciousness, a crisis must be manufactured to distract and re-Other the group that is deemed undesirable by the controlling elites.

The existence of Others is necessary for the forces of control to make the eternally useful and rouinely succesful lie of Us-vs-Them work to absorb the mass of humanity in fighting against those who have the most in common with them so the controlling elites don't have to worry about how they can keep their power, privilege, and prestige intact against the outrage and hatred of those they oppress to serve them, not their own needs.

Political fiction done so well that, unless you already knew it was political, you wouldn't know. For that reason, I encourage you to gift it to your videogame addicted teen boy. Anything we can do to wedge his mind open a wee tiny bit for non-authoritarian thoughts to enter is good.

NO GODS, NO MONSTERS, first in a series, author's second novel, lauded and loved and awarded

NO GODS, NO MONSTERS
CADWELL TURNBULL (Convergence Saga #1)
Blackstone Publishing (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$4.99 Kindle edition, avaiable now

Nominated for the BEST NOVEL AWARD—2021 SHIRLEY JACKSON AWARDS!

Rating: 4* of five, all for the slow-burn realization of the identity of the true main character

FINALIST FOR THE 2022 LOCUS AWARD—BEST FANTASY NOVEL! Winners announced 25 June 2022.

WINNER OF THE 34th Lambda Literary Award—BEST LGBTQ SPECULATIVE FICTION!

A NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY 2021 BEST BOOK FOR ADULTS RECOMMENDATION!

The Publisher Says: One October morning, Laina gets the news that her brother was 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 bread crumbs 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.

I GOT THIS BOOK FREE WITH KINDLE CREDITS. SHOP OFTEN! THE REWARDS ARE REAL. (/irony)

My Review: I think the worst part of reading this book was realizing that the monsters, the not-villainous villains of the piece, are me, my friends, my lover, all of us Othered by...so many factors.

“I’m sorry to do it this way, but I had to be safe,” Melku explains. “I won’t waste any more time. Our collective’s mission is to support the solidarity movement. Often, that has meant supporting marginalized peoples. Some of you are part of the queer and trans community, like me. Many of the most valuable monsters are also a part of these communities, which is why redefining to include them is so important. In that spirit, I think we should extend our support to monsters since it is likely that they’re already in the movement but have chosen to remain silent.”

A political meeting of anarchists in a collective...votes to include literal monsters...the kind that actually DO eat people...in its aims. This book...its imagination shames me.

I've never, ever once thought, "well, civil rights for werewolves should absolutely be guaranteed."

What is left for me to learn over the remainder of my life never, ever stops expanding. ...Yay...? And before anyone says it, no there are not actually werewolves or any other creatures we call monsters, but there are a LOT of humans I'd unhesitatingly call monsters all over the country where I live. All over the only planet we know of that has life on it. So there's clearly no god, either, because if so they're either weak or malevolent since they can't or won't fix things they broke. The book's title, then, snaps into focus: "NO GODS, NO MASTERS," the anarchist chant goes; now that "monsters" are real and have come out of their socially imposed hiding, it needs refreshing: "NO GODS, NO MONSTERS," or a simple acknowledgment that we are all on this lifeboat in the middle of a deadly environment and had all better get busy saving owrselves and each other from paying the ultimate price. No one above means no one below. And that, somehow, is terrible, bad, threatening...why, exactly? Because monsters are Evil? Because, if no one is In Control, things will be...worse? ("For whom" is left unstated. Obviously things will be worse for the ones who benefit from the way they are now.)

But the truth is, it never turns out that way. Marriage equality didn't turn Society into limp-wristed men in feather boas, or women in plaid shirts and bad haircuts. It resulted in a revolting boom in the wedding industrial complex. A lot of bigots making noise about being asked to bake cakes for people they didn't like much. COVID kills us all (in the USA, a million in two years which is more than the 698,000-plus AIDS has killed in 42), and capitalism couldn't care less about who's zoomin' who as long as the survivors consume consume consume.

The principal problem for me is the story's diffusion of narrative drive among so many characters. I do understand this fits the anarchist genesis of the story. But it plays into a problem that trumps political concerns: How am I supposed to sustain momentum in the read? I was able to make my way through the book but it took me longer than it usually does to finish it...almost a month. For fewer than three hundred pages.

I overcame that issue by remembering this phrase that I've entered into my commonplace book:

As he walks with the crowd, he understands what he had forgotten: that a march is not just a voice against violence and trauma, but also a reminder that even in a cause that is stacked against them, no one is alone.

Remember the Tiananmen Tank Guy? He is the reason governments work so hard to suppress free media; he is the reason many of us bother to protest in whatever ways we can. He stood alone, but crowds of protestors aren't when he appears in our minds' eyes. This is also why crowds become mobs, and why protest is something that deeply disturbs the Powers That Be.

When cops kill innocent people nowadays, we as a society are almost sure there will be protests. But now there is a complicating factor of monsters, creatures we're afraid of and whose means of making a living is violent by their very nature; they are, by the definitions we've all come to understand and possibly even accept, but certainly internalize, unnatural:

Near Ridley, a man yells, “No Gods.”

“No monsters,” the crowd chants back.

The chant is an evolution of an anarchist slogan: “No Gods, No Masters,” the original version meaning no human above. It is a call against hierarchy. Ridley assumes the variation means no human above, no human below, or something like it. A call against hierarchy and discrimination.

Simon-pure anarchist speak. Like being in a steering committee meeting for any politics at the local level organization. It is, in other words, bedrock truth that this story rests on. It is this meticulous inclusiveness by dint of hard-fought local battles that gives me little moments of happy recognition and pleasurable fellow feeling, of not being alone as I face a hostile-to-me world.

Go with Author Turnbull on the hunt for the truth of Power through these many points of view. Power resisted, power obtained, power flouted and abused...there is all the power any one being or group can ever use in the simplest truth of them all: Mystery exerts power in ways nothing else can hope to equal, still less surpass.

56 DAYS, a super-suspenseful story that wins on every level

56 DAYS
CATHERINE RYAN HOWARD
Blackstone Publishing
$19.99 hardcover, available now

NOW $1.99 ON KINDLE! (non-affiliate Amazon link)

Rating: 4.5* of five

A NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY 2021 BEST BOOK FOR ADULTS RECOMMENDATION!

The Publisher Says: No one knew they'd moved in together. Now one of them is dead. Could this be the perfect murder?

56 DAYS AGO
Ciara and Oliver meet in a supermarket queue in Dublin the same week Covid-19 reaches Irish shores.

35 DAYS AGO
When lockdown threatens to keep them apart, Oliver suggests that Ciara move in with him. She sees a unique opportunity for a new relationship to flourish without the pressure of scrutiny of family and friends. He sees it as an opportunity to hide who - and what - he really is.

TODAY
Detectives arrive at Oliver's apartment to discover a decomposing body inside.

Will they be able to determine what really happened, or has lockdown provided someone with the opportunity to commit the perfect crime?

I RECEIVED THIS AS A YULE GIFT. THANK YOU, KIND ELF!

My Review: There’s always room for the thriller genre to expand. It’s been a generation since gay characters were allowed to live past the ending, as mysteries made their peace with us in the Brandstetter books; we’ve been promoted to sleuths! It’s been a generation, too, since heroines were normalized in the hardboiled end of the genre, with Sue Grafton’s damaged and flawless Kinsey Milhone.

But what hasn’t happened all that often, and what still feels surprising and fresh and fun to read, is the moral grayness of female thriller leads. They’ve been haunted; they’ve been vengeful; but they’ve either Done Wrong and Suffered, or Been Victims and Suffered. Isn’t that tedious? Isn’t that unrealistic? I know actual women, I know they’re (mostly!) neither Supervillainesses without a shred of conscience or Saintly Martyrs. They’re messy, muddleheaded people. They fuck up, they attempt to atone for it, they make awful mistakes and terrible decisions. They are, in other words, just...people.

Fiction hasn’t adjusted to the reality of women’s ordinariness. But Catherine Ryan Howard has.

Ciara Murphy is an ordinary, plain-old-folks, woman. She is about to turn herself into a pretzel of anxiety when we meet her because an impossibly handsome man has just Noticed Her and she isn’t able to believe that he’s actually behaving like a decent guy who’s just seen someone he wants to get to know better. That doesn’t happen between Adonis-like men called something as elegant as Oliver Kennedy and pleasantly plain lasses like her. Happen, however, it does:

And he’s so attractive that she knows instantly the world he lives in is not the same one in which she does, that he can’t possibly experience it the same way. A face like that affords a different kind of existence, one in which you arrive into every situation with some degree of preapproval. But you don’t know it, don’t reavlize that you’re being ushered into the priority lane of life every single day.

She wonders what that does to a person.

Nothing good, Ciara. Nothing good, and sometimes quite terrible things. As we’re all aware, there is male privilege and there is nothing good that comes from the possession of that plus good looks plus...though this is Ireland, and therefore the whitest of the white-people countries...white privilege. But Ciara’s white, too, and it’s time to face up to this book’s blind spot. Everyone in this story is a privileged and spoiled First Worlder having seriously First-World problems.

She keeps a screenshot on her phone of a quote by, supposedly, Abraham Lincoln: Discipline is choosing between what you want now and what you want the most. Maybe that’s true, but discipline has never been her problem. It’s fear she struggles with. She thinks courage might be choosing between what you want now and what you want most, because what she wants now is to walk away, to shut this down, to close the door.

That said, we move on. And it’s where we move on to that makes 56 Days a deeply compelling, fully absorbing, surprisingly exciting thriller.

We know as readers that the purpose of a thriller is to thrill. Often that comes in the form of action, chase scenes, danger and blood and pain as Events Unfold. But this story is set on the brink of a worldwide pandemic and its uncertainty, its movement-restricting lockdown(s), its fear of others and its focus on somehow staying safe. But safety means different things to Oliver Kennedy and to Ciara Murphy. How much different is what what becomes so clear after the scene is set. They’re going to spend the lockdown cocooned together. This is, for reasons that are slowly and steadily brought into focus, something each urgently desires. They’re both unable to believe their luck, the way the world’s conspired to give them what the need the most.

They’ve been on a few dates. That, and some sex, and an undeniably mutual sense of their rightness of fit together, is what they decide when they’re forced by the pandemic to choose between lockdown apart and forming their own household. They each know they’re being rushed into this too fast; they each decide, for their own reasons, to make the lockdown into an opportunity to explore the new, strange-to-each sense of connection they’re experiencing. Neither decides to share their decision with others in their lives. I sure as heck wouldn’t, would you? Imagine the lectures, the sermonizing, the sheer next-to-panic worry the decision would evoke in a loving family member or even a very good friend. I’d be harping on the idiocy of thinking you know someone who’s barely even an acquaintance enough to spend two weeks of 24/7 days with them!

And now, I suspect there’s something you’re beginning to notice isn’t adding up. I’ve called this story a thriller. And it’s taking place in lockdown. A notoriously sedentary and isolated time. What kind of thriller are we going to get out of that? Just lots of sex, of discovery that Mr. Right is barely Mr. Right Now and Miss Congeniality is in fact vanilla ice cream with blue cheese dressing?

Author Howard has prepared a path for us that takes us into and back out of the past in several layers. The chapters are titled things like “23 Days Ago” and “Now” and the like. Each “Now” chapter focuses on the national police of Ireland, the Garda, investigating the discovery of a dead, badly decomposed body in a new, upscale apartment development. The lives of the senior investigating officers are sketched in but are done so in a way I found compelling and convincing. Like the senior officer getting a text from her junior that he needs her to come unlock him from the handcuffs his last lay left him hooked to the headboard with. We don’t get details. We do get some banter and some clues to the relationship she has with her foolish Sergeant.

What we also get is the certainty that we’re in good storytelling hands. In a chapter of under three thousand words we’re clear that she’s a good friend, a solid mentor, and he’s a foolish risk-taking adrenaline junkie with a great future behind him. They’re going to do everything they can figure out together to solve the puzzle of a dead person in a shower whose name they don’t know and whose life is so unmoored to anyone that the reason the body was discovered is the smell of it rotting bothered the people living in the same hall.

It is in these jump-cuts, these bits of time out of order, that the tapestry of awful crime and condign punishment play out. It is Ciara’s and Oliver’s story, as deeply intertwined and as messily disguised as each facet is, that keeps readerly fingers flipping pages. (Tapping them, in my case; this was a Kindle purchase using up 99¢ of a gift card.) As the points of view shift each time there’s a new date, more and more of the dead body’s tale of woes and wretchedness and unbearably poignant longing to explain and comfort and make things better comes into focus. There is never just one strand to the story. There is never just one angle of attack from which we’re approaching it, as Ciara and Oliver each reveal to the reader how few facts they’re revealing to each other. Every perspective shift offers a different story, both being told and potentially veering off from what has happened...there is a rotting body in a shower in an apartment.

It’s the why of it that is so gripping not the what. It’s the uncertainty that Author Howard uses to make us care...who is the dead person? Why are they dead? How and when did it happen?...over and over, on more and more layers of facts gleaned and fitted into the central puzzle of who the victim is. That answer is revealed as each layer of fact, each question answered, build the shape of the truth underneath the simple set up. A dead body is found in a shower by gardaí called to make a wellness check in a pandemic lockdown.

When all is revealed, as it is, the tense and frustrating ride is very much worth taking. It was never going to be exactly what I expected it to be, as I expected. After all, it’s a thriller. The point of the genre’s conventions is to go on a journey, to make one’s expectations go in ways the answer will not. As accustomed to that fact as I am, I was not expecting the resolution to the central mystery to take the final twist that it did. I’m not at all sure that it was the resolution, in fact; I can see Author Howard’s wicked little smile and devilishly quirked eyebrow as the facts she presents are snapped into a solid, firmly fitting pattern.

That isn’t at all the Truth. Unless it is. But it...really, honestly...might not be. It might be a shadow cast in a weird way by the always fickle Moon moving in its speedy course.

Lies are spindly, unwieldy things. Delicate filaments, like bundles of nerves in the body. Easy to twist, hard to control, impossible to keep hold of.

At the end of this story, Ciara Murphy and Oliver Kennedy are each deeply enmeshed in delicate, twisted filaments of lies told, believed, sold to a desperate self in need of something to hold on to. At the end of this story, there is no ending because the Truth can’t be packaged by being sculpted from facts. In the end, I think the best thrillers are the ones that obey the rules of evidence, that make sure you have facts that matter and are making the story make sense; this story does that at every turn.

Then it stands the facts on their spindly, delicate bundles, and shows you that the truth is you can’t be sure there’s any Truth in the facts. But there’s a thumping good read in them and a pleasure to be derived from their collection. (Just ignore the five (5) w-bombs.)