Black Afterlives Matter, Part II

Cadwell Turnbull, We Are the Crisis: a Novel

This review follows the book reviewed in Black Afterlives Matter

Two years after werewolves, vampires, and shapeshifters revealed themselves on the streets of Boston, some “monsters” are settling into healthy lives. Others, not so much. A faction of monsters have profited handsomely from their adversarial relationship with humans, and aren’t willing to relinquish their advantage. And some humans resent the changes they didn’t ask for, forming anti-monster vigilante groups in response. Something must give; the only question is what.

Volume Two of Cadwell Turnbull’s Convergence Saga drops two years after the first, which is somewhat awkward, since Turnbull provides few refreshers for veteran readers. I remember liking the first volume, with its blend of literary and genre conventions, its character-driven story structure, and its experimental use of a narrative voice that has come unstuck from the story. But I don’t remember his cast of thousands or their intricate relationships.

Ridley, Laina, and Rebecca have lost their werewolf pack, and someone doesn’t want them to find it. They try investigating the disappearances, and realize they can’t do it alone. So, against the advice of fellow “monsters,” they attempt to organize the monster movement and create a sense of solidarity. Unfortunately, as disfranchised peoples have always discovered, you can’t organize without drawing attention to yourself; the Black Hand starts hunting them.

Teenage Dragon enjoys the freedom he’s encountered since escaping a private collector’s perverted zoo. But the trade-off to freedom is remaining incognito, concealing the fire-breathing force of nature he truly is. The slightest slip means his human allies pay the price—as he learns when his comes home to find his adoptive human parents murdered. His friends scramble to compensate, but Dragon still lives with a target on his back.

Sondra has left public service to protect her secret shapeshifter identity. She attempts to live as a soft-spoken community organizer in the U.S. Virgin Islands, a remote American outpost that offers the opportunity to experiment with revisionist economic models. (Models which Sondra explains volubly.) But she can’t outrun her family’s history as embodiments of the islands’ primordial elements, and someone seems eager to expose her secrets in public.

Cadwell Turnbull

As these sprawling synopses imply, Turnbull doesn’t really write one novel. Basically, he’s written four intersecting novellas around the same theme. As the Convergence Saga title indicates the stories converge toward a unified climax, but for most of the book, Turnbull’s characters occupy their own worlds, with their own conflicts; sometimes, their stories seem to contradict one another. The resolution of that apparent contradiction is part of the payoff.

Consistent with the previous volume, Turnbull doesn’t blush to spotlight his story’s parallels with real-world issues. The previous novel dealt with the collisions between majority-led police power and minority populations. This novel carries these same stories, but not with the same torch-wielding vigor. Turnbull still deals with racial issues, but not necessarily directly; he in fact takes great pains to avoid mentioning his characters’ race, unless they mention it themselves.

Instead, Turnbull mainly inveighs against economic injustice. He repeats the words “cooperative” and “solidarity” heavily, alongside other revolutionary economic buzzwords. One of Turnbull’s protagonists, Sondra, has left public service to organize Mondragon-style worker cooperatives. His other protagonists organize against hatred under the cover of economic solidarity, while his antagonists disguise their bigotry behind claims of economic grievance.

This does require some level of patience. Much as I enjoy Turnbull’s story overall, it nevertheless sometimes feels like he’s lecturing his readers, in passages that expound his themes but don’t advance his story. This volume is fairly average length for a mass-market genre novel in the current market, but probably could’ve been fifty pages shorter without the economic theorizing. Even though it’s a theory I personally find admirable.

That said, Turnbull writes about the forces that turn ordinary people into “monsters” and chronic outsiders, and economics is one of those forces. It’s unlikely he could entirely excise the theorizing without short-changing his themes. Turnbull wants you to think, not only about what happens to these characters, but about why it happens, what forces outside individual control hastened this conflict, even before these characters fell backward into it.

Hovering over everything is the narrator, an enigmatic figure whose relationship to Cadwell Turnbull is, let’s say, vexed. Like the characters, the narrator only wants answers. Unlike the characters, the narrator has become unhitched from the story, and understands himself as a narrator. This forces him to reckon with why, if he’s telling the story, he can’t see where it’s headed. That question remains unresolved, postponed until Volume Three.