Кадвелл Тёрнбулл: о разрушительной силе тайн и новом романе в жанре хоррор-триллер

Interview Devastating and Liberating: A Conversation with Cadwell Turnbull Cadwell Turnbull was born in Chevy Chase, MD, and moved to his parents’ home island of St. Thomas when he was an infant. He moved to Pittsburgh to attend La Roche University and earned a degree in professional writing. He returned to St. Thomas for a year and worked as a substitute teacher, then taught in South Korea for a year. Afterward, he worked as a media coordinator for AmeriCorps and as a journalist on St. Thomas while attending NC State University. Turnbull earned a creative writing MFA in fiction and an English MA in linguistics. One of his teachers was author John Kessel, who introduced Turnbull to Octavia E. Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy, books that became important to Turnbull’s debut novel, The Lesson. Turnbull attended Clarion West in 2016. Cadwell Turnbull’s work is sophisticated speculative fiction with a literary flair and a deep interest in the human condition. His work often takes on socially charged issues and sometimes draws on his experiences of moving from place to place, as well as a layered sense of otherness. His books draw critical acclaim from both within and without genre circles. Turnbull’s first published story was in Nightmare Magazine in 2017: “Loneliness Is in Your Blood” (reprinted in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018 edited by N. K. Jemisin and John Joseph Adams), followed by “Other Worlds and This One” in Asimov’s and “A Third of the Stars of Heaven” in Lightspeed, also in 2017. Blackstone published Turnbull’s debut novel The Lesson in 2019, which received glowing reviews from nearly every respected industry outlet you could think of. The Lesson was included in “Best of 2019” lists for Library Journal, Kirkus, and Publishers Weekly. The novel also landed on the Locus Recommended Reading List, was long listed for the Massachusetts Book Award, short listed for the VCU Cabell Award, and won the 2020 Neukom Institute Literary Arts Award for Speculative Fiction in the Debut category. Cadwell Turnbull’s The Convergence Saga (published by Blackstone) began with No Gods, No Monsters in 2021, which was long listed for the PEN Open Award, was a Shirley Jackson, Manly Wade Wellman, and Locus awards finalist, and won a Lambda. The series continued with We Are the Crisis (2023) and A Ruin, Great and Free (2025). Other projects include anthologies, he is one of the five authors who publish collectively as Darkly Lem, and he founded Many Worlds, which could be described as a shared world collective publication. Turnbull lives in Munich with his family. His debut collection, All the Hidden Places, is due this month from Blackstone. After roughly a decade in fiction publishing, what have been the biggest surprises, what have been the biggest challenges, and how did you overcome them? That’s a very good question. I don’t know if I’ve been surprised exactly, but I’ve been humbled by this profession in many ways. How can I put this: publishing is like drowning and being in a desert at the same time. I expected both, sort of. I am overwhelmed by everyday life, so I knew eventually I would find publishing overwhelming. But this year I’m publishing two books: a collection and a cowritten second book in a trilogy. That’s overwhelming stuff. On the other hand, I was well prepared by my MFA mentors for how much of publishing is waiting—for something to happen: a book to come out, a story to get published, an opportunity to present itself, et cetera. And when nothing is happening, you’re trying to make something happen. But those two experiences don’t exist separately; they’re roommates. You can’t get comfortable. You can’t get complacent. Everything is precarious. Everything is happening, all at once. I don’t know if I’ve overcome this challenge. But lately I’ve been trying to tell myself that I can take a breath. I need to. My wife and I are new parents to twin girls. At the moment, I’m the stay-at-home parent. I’ve had to get comfortable with getting less writing done. But even before this, the last few years have been me learning to pace myself and give myself grace. And that has made me more disciplined with the projects I do commit myself to. Not perfectly. But steadiness does wonders for a writing career. Who are your biggest influences or inspirations in terms of writing? What speaks to you about their works? I’ve talked about Ursula K. Le Guin a lot over the years. And she remains the writer I am always returning to or wanting to return to. There are a handful of writers I’ll reread, partly to marvel again at their brilliance, and partly to try and learn something new from their work. Le Guin is at the top of that list. I’m always learning something new. Some others (none particularly surprising): N. K. Jemisin, Ted Chiang, Octavia E. Butler. Emily St. John Mandel. Colson Whitehead. I think with all these writers there’s an interest in exploring big questions in the work. Sometimes it is sociopolitical, sometimes it is philosophical. The challenge of bringing these big ideas down to Earth is in the craft, and all these writers are masters of their craft. In their work, the big is counterbalanced by the small, a profound attention to the details. Attempting this is at the heart of my own work. What is your relationship to short stories, as opposed to novels? Is one format more challenging, are there other things that set them apart? I wouldn’t say one format is more challenging. Perhaps differently challenging. With a short story, you have more freedom with what you want as your narrative engine. A short story can be about an idea or theme, a character, a setting, a moment. One of my favorite flash stories is “A History of Everything, Including You” by Jenny Hollowell. That story starts big, like the-beginning-of-the-universe big, and then ends on a marriage, on a small moment of natural beauty. You can do that in a novel, for sure, but with a short story you can take huge leaps like that, and everything can still hold together; you can take swings that won’t easily hold up at novel length. But by that same measure, a short story isn’t very forgiving. A short story works best if every line is doing something. You need mega intentionality. In a novel, you can have some moments of autopilot. Functional sentences. Functional scenes. The whole has to really land, but the parts don’t have to hit at the same level continuously. However, a novel is a test of endurance. It is a long drive. That makes it hard to finish one. And even after finishing one, the revision process can break you. Truthfully, I’ve designed my projects to combine what I love about both forms. My novels are short-story-like. They’re mosaics. I get to take big swings while taking the long drive. My next novel project is likely going to be more traditionally structured, so I’ll probably have a better answer after I survive that one. If I survive it . . . What, for you, is special about genre fiction—what does speculative fiction do that is different or important? I think it is similar to my answer to the previous question. Speculative fiction allows for the freedom to build your story around big ideas. You’re not limited by what is plausibly real. You get to define what’s real and ground it in mechanisms that are real-seeming. One of the stories in my collection is about a god that questions for the first time if they’ve always existed. Ibamwe asks: what came before me? And that sends them on an adventure. That is highly speculative. And it took me a long, long time to figure out how to ground it. But the fact that I could write a story like that has everything to do with what makes speculative fiction so great. You can ask big questions. And you can answer them. And the limits are your own limits. You can take it as far as you’re able to. Beyond that, my favorite speculative works use the genre to question reality: beliefs about it, systems with it, the foundations themselves. It’s transgressive, transformative, challenging. And, yes, you can do that with any genre, but as soon as you make one of your characters inexplicably has wings, you’ve stepped over. With speculative fiction, there’s no stepping over. That’s the magic of it. All the Hidden Places is your debut collection. What is the importance of this book for you? Easy. All my favorite stories in one place, in conversation with each other. I love anthologies, but even in themed anthologies, the stories are doing very different things. For better or worse, a collection is connected by the preoccupations of a single author. And reading a great collection is sort of like listening to a cohesive album. There’s a story in the differences, a thread binding the spaces between. All the Hidden Places shows my preoccupations very clearly, even when the stories are very different. Sometimes that is a bit embarrassing. There’s certainly a way I like to end my “self-discovery” stories, for example. But it is also beautiful to see all the progress I’ve made as a writer while also seeing the things I keep returning to. Nothing is ever done, and all that. The name for this book is taken from the story “All the Hidden Places,” which was originally published in a horror magazine (Nightmare, 2019). Why was this the perfect name for this collection? That story is about a devastating family secret that becomes darkly liberating by the end. A lot of the stories have a similar tension. The characters are hiding something, or they’re looking for something, or something finds them. Often that secret thing, or that hidden place, turns out to be complicated, difficult, devastating. But in many of the stories, if the character makes it to the other side, they are transformed. I really like that. That there could be something beautiful lurking in the dark places, past the horror. The title has a reverence to it. I think that makes it perfect for the collection. What went into deciding which stories would be in the book, and how were the stories organized? I won’t lie. Most of my stories are in the collection. I have very predictable preoccupations. The ones excluded were because they truly didn’t make sense in the collection. There’s a loose organizational structure by genre to start. I move from fantasy (or horror) to science fiction in the beginning until the genre-fluidity of certain stories breaks that organizational structure. Then the structure is wound around other concerns. “A Tech Mage Comes to Visit,” for example, is set in a second world, but the story is very grounded and formally straightforward. It is then followed by “Soul Jars Singing in the Night”: a strange story in both concept and form. And then that is followed by “The World Above, a Triptych,” which is very strange when compared to anything that came before. I wanted these backend stories to escalate in strangeness before ending the collection with something equally grounded and slippery. So the collection is establishing rules that it is breaking as it goes along. I hope that makes sense. I wanted it to feel like a waking journey that’s slowly slipping away into dream. Thinking on the pieces with the oldest publication dates (“Loneliness Is in Your Blood” from 2017, “Jump” and “When The Rains Come Back” from 2018) up to the newest pieces (“Wandering Devil” and “A Tech Mage Comes to Visit” from 2023—plus the originals), what do you see as the most significant ways they speak to your journey as a writer, to the things that have changed about your approach to fiction? I mean, in a lot of ways nothing has changed. I was a little surprised by that. In my mind, I thought I had changed more. My later stories are a bit technically ambitious at times? But I can also point to earlier stories that were doing similar things, sometimes more effectively. My journey as a writer hasn’t been particularly linear. Some of my later stories are more relaxed on the line level. Or maybe more dynamic? Peaks and valleys—I’m not trying to show off; whatever gets the work done without compromising quality. Or maybe I have a better grasp of my limitations, and so I lean more on narrative craft. Okay . . . I think maybe the difference is that I’m more confident in my later stories. I know where they want to go and have a better sense of how to get there. And I’m doing less convincing on the page. I think that is a maturity thing, not a skill thing. A writer might be more skilled, but the confidence to be bold in narrative decisions unselfconsciously is a thing a writer acquires through writing for a while, growth as a function of time. Are there one or two stories in this collection that stand out for you in some way, whether they were more challenging, spoke more deeply to something personal, or something else? I have a few very personal stories. But the ones that stand out for me are more for technical reasons. They’re both later stories, both originals, too. “Ibamwe and the Mountain Box” was one that took me a long time to figure out. It is an entire rewrite of a different story. And that story had at least five versions (full revisions) before I decided to start again. I had to unlock the other two stories in “The Worlds Above, a Triptych” before that last one snapped into focus. I think it is some of my strongest work even though the writing itself is very simple. It is balancing a lot of narrative intentions at the same time in a way I don’t think I could’ve managed before. The story took over a decade to get right. So it also means a lot to me because of the effort it took, and the growth that was necessary for that effort to pay off. The last story in the collection is a favorite. There’s more than one way to read it. Some of my favorite stories have buried narrative threads that alter the reading experience if they are discovered. That’s all I’ll say about that. But the thing I love most about that story is how much the characters care for each other while still making their own very difficult decisions. It is messy, but despite that, there’s a kindness to the relationship at the heart of the story. A good comp for this is Past Lives (2023). I love that movie for allowing the mess along with the humanity. “If Only Time Permits” is trying to do the same. What can you tell us about “Jump,” what is this story about, and why did you want it in this book? Sort of a spoiler, though not really: “Jump” is literally about a couple that inexplicably teleports together one time, and it ruins their relationship. The story is really about two different ways of responding to magical moments in life: trying to capture it or simply letting it be. The latter choice allows the moment to alter you. It is more open. But for a long time, I was in the former camp. If I experienced something magical like that, I’d want to do it again or at least make sense of it. Truthfully, I wanted it in the collection because it is one of my most successful stories in terms of reach. It has been reprinted, included in a best of anthology, and featured on LeVar Burton Reads. I think it is my most-read story. I also just think it is a lot of fun. It’s short and sweet, not doing too much. When you think of the title story “All the Hidden Places,” what is special about this one, what is important or interesting about it for you? I mentioned earlier that it is about a dark family secret that becomes darkly liberating. I think that story is special because it is morally ambiguous and comfortable with that fact. I also think it is one of the few stories in the collection that has an action plot. A lot of my stories are character studies. This one is too. But it also has teeth. I like that. What can you tell us about the original stories, without spoiling the read too much: “Soul Jars Singing in the Night”; “The World Above, a Triptych”; and “If Only Time Permits”? “Soul Jars” is about—surprise!—a family secret that becomes darkly liberating. It is set in a world where people have more than one soul in their bodies. “The World Above . . . ” stories are about gods trying to answer their own greatest mysteries. Shenanigans ensue. “If Only Time Permits” is set in a world where people can give some of their own time to other people. It is about a wife who is considering giving time to her sick husband, but that decision leads to a more difficult one. I’ll leave it there. Even what I already said feels like I’m spoiling too much. Thinking about all the stories in the book, which range from hard science fiction to fantasy and everything between, do you see themes or motifs that many of them come back to? Are there connections they share? Okay, time to be more explicit about my preoccupations. I often write about family members trying to figure out how to accept one another, heal old wounds, work their way through fundamental disagreements. Several stories in the collection are about that, like “The Letters Triptych,” “When the Rains Come Back,” and “All the Hidden Places.” I also write stories about characters on the verge of making difficult decisions. Those stories hinge on what decision they will make. “Wandering Devil,” the first story in the collection, and “If Only Time Permits,” the last story, are both of that type. Stories of people dealing with significant trauma or loss. The whole point of those stories is for the characters to work through their issues as they navigate a current situation that is challenging them within the story. “Mediation” and “Monsters Come Howling in The Season” are both of that type. Some others too. And then secrets and discovery stories. Some of these are personal; some are metaphysical; some are both at once. The god stories are of this type. “Shock of Birth” is also of this type while also being a trauma-loss story and a difficult decision story. Stories about societies on the verge of great change. Sometimes these are paired with characters on the verge of difficult decisions. You get it. There’s a lot of crossover when it comes to these preoccupations. Is there anything else you’d like folks to know about you, your work, or All the Hidden Places? No, I’ve said enough. I’m starting to break out in hives from all the spoiling I’m doing. What are you working on now—what’s coming out or coming up that fans can look forward to? I am in the process of selling a new novel (if all goes well). It is a horror thriller with a single POV, both things I’ve never done at novel length. I also am about to start copy edits on the last book in a trilogy I’ve cowritten with four other authors under the pseudonym Darkly Lem. I am very excited for people to read the last book in the Formation Saga. Really proud of what me and the crew (Josh Eure, M. Darusha Wehm, Craig Lincoln, and Ben Murphy) have managed to do together. Arley Sorg is an associate agent at kt literary. He is a two-time World Fantasy Award Finalist and a two-time Locus Award Finalist for his work as co-Editor-in-Chief at Fantasy Magazine. Arley is also a SFWA Solstice Award Recipient, a Space Cowboy Award Recipient, and a finalist for two Ignyte Awards. Arley is senior editor at Locus, associate editor at both Lightspeed & Nightmare, a columnist for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and an interviewer for Clarkesworld.