The book, which was short-listed for the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize, was generally well-received by critics, with The New York Times calling it "an irreverent bible in its own right, a sort of celestial thought experiment".

[3] Subin had written roughly a third of the Accidental Gods manuscript without a particular proposal in mind, having planned to finish the book before shopping it to publishers, before becoming discouraged that no one would be interested in buying the work.

[1][7] Subin attempts to provide historical context for the situations she studies in order to properly understand why events occurred as they did, as opposed to much of the previous research that simply assumed an "inherent backwardness" on the part of the worshippers.

The former found himself the object of worship by inhabitants of the island of Tanna; in an example of "mutual mythmaking", the British government encouraged such adulation, even going so far as to send autographed portraits to the prince's acolytes.

[5][10] MacArthur, meanwhile, became revered in four separate nations during and following his World War II military campaigns, including in Japan even after he called for Emperor Hirohito to reject his own apotheosis.

One case study that Subin examines is the circumstances of a 19th-century Protestant Irish man named John Nicholson, an army officer who held the people of South Asia in contempt due to his time as a prisoner of war in Kabul in addition to finding his brother's tortured body in the Khyber Pass.

[11] As Nicholson rose in the military ranks he became known as a brutally violent man – he used a severed head as an office decoration – yet he gained acolytes among the Sikh and Hindu peoples who believed him to be the reincarnation of one of Muhammad's grandsons.

[11] This cult of "Nikal Seyn" persisted after Nicholson's death and into the 20th century, and thrived, Subin argues, because rather than be cowed by the officer and the colonial masters he represented, the native people chose instead to take his power into their own hands: "By partaking in his divinity," she writes, "they were no longer simply creatures, but creators of fear.

Wilson, too, noted Subin's deft handling of describing history repeating itself, as with the current inhabitants of the island of Tanna now facing a new imperialist threat in the form of climate change.

[10] The New Republic called Subin's voice "stylish" and "playful" and praised her ability to draw connections from her deified subjects to modern conversations of race and "anti-colonial resistance".