All the Hidden Places

“Turnbull’s short fiction is a universe of quiet marvels, piercing emotions, and bold imagination. I love his monsters, especially his werewolves, I love his flawed heroes, and I especially love all the subtle and incisive ways he explores human relationships—love, communities, family. This collection is a treasure trove of finely crafted stories and a must-read for any fan of speculative fiction.”

“Good stories deliver a kind of electric zap to the head and to the heart, and this is what Cadwell Turnbull’s stories do. I meant to read them more slowly, but instead I read one story and thought, ‘just one more,’ and having read one more thought again, ‘just one more,’ until I’d reached the end of the collection. I loved these stories individually, and as a collection they are a feast.”

“Haunting. Fantastic. Mesmerizing. All the Hidden Places takes readers on an imaginative ride with spellbinding tales of dystopian futures, the monsters that live among us, wandering gods, and more. Cadwell Turnbull is one of the most gifted storytellers of our age—and in this latest offering, he does not disappoint!”

“A dazzling collection of speculative stories from one of the top talents in the field, All the Hidden Places displays Cadwell Turnbull’s wide-ranging imagination and unique vision: Dystopian worlds, ancient magic, and monsters from Caribbean folklore merge in stories unlike anything else you’ve ever read or ever will. At the same time, no matter how cosmic the scale, Turnbull never loses sight of the human dimension—the fears, struggles for connection, and hard-won moments of grace that define our lives.”

“All the Hidden Places is, in a word, spectacular. Turnbull spins aching, vibrant connections between his characters and their families, their communities, their monsters, and their gods. Each story is constructed with reverence and precision; together, they are facets of an astonishing universe. Turnbull is a Grandmaster in the making.”

“Any excuse to get lost in Cadwell Turnbull’s words is a cause for celebration, but a collection of his short stories is a feast. His stories burrow under your skin, alive with both historical memory and current events. His characters navigate a landscape that have been broken in all-too-familiar ways. Asking what it means to survive an unraveling of life while trying to make sense of it. And yet there is a persistent, unsentimental compassion to his work. Luminous, strange, and deeply human, now is your excuse to get lost in Cadwell Turnbull’s worlds.”

“Whether it’s within our own world, or some landscape beyond our imagining, Cadwell Turnbull renders in precise prose what it means to be human: how we love, fear, and try to be. These stories serve as both a mirror and a guide, at times terrifying in their clarity, but always moving and enjoyable to read.”

“Here is a collection of marvels—tales of horror, politics (but I repeat myself), loss, and creation—artfully constructed and beautifully told. Turnbull’s voice is unique and unforgettable, fantastic and fantastical.”

“Among the most hidden of the hidden places revealed in Cadwell Turnbull’s stories is the human heart. In ‘The Letters Tryptych’—three stories, each from the point of view of one of three siblings in the dystopian future US that we seem to be headed for—we see how the technological affects the social which affects the political which affects the personal. The resulting chain of action and reaction, tragedy and hope, shows how speculative fiction can present a true picture of actual people in the actual world. ‘A promise is a sandcastle; time, a tide.’”

“Turnbull’s stories are all written in magnificent detail and emotional prose; this is a must-add to all speculative fiction shelves.”

“Turnbull’s tales, inspired by the real-world landscape and community of St. Thomas, showcase an optimism for what AI could be and do, and a love for complicated characters who deal with tough choices, grief, and big world changes in their own ways.”

“Cadwell Turnbull is a true cosmic cartographer. Charting worlds unknown with an empathic eye, Turnbull maps hearts human, monstrous, and godly, illustrating through evocative, beautiful fiction that the boundaries between the three are thinner than we think. Unfurl this map, and get ready to discover his uncanny and excellent hidden places.”

“One of the things I admire most about Cadwell Turnbull’s writing is the way he holds a theme up to the light. He’s not afraid to examine big topics—mortality and immortality, souls, time, gods and creation—but always allows the reader to view them through the lens of character. His stories are populated with people who stay and people who go, with survivors, with monsters and mages, all of whom themselves ask those same hard questions. These are rich stories that resonate long past their reading.”

“As his novels do, the stories in Turnbull’s first collection use big ideas in speculative fiction to examine intimate relationships…Rich and strange, while going straight to the heart.”