Guest post from In the Garden of Monsters author Crystal King
Crystal King is the author of In the Garden of Monsters, a retelling of the Hades and Persephone myth, told from the point of view of a model Salvador Dali brings to Italy’s Sacro Bosco garden in 1948. She is also the author of The Chef’s Secret and Feast of Sorrow, which was long-listed at the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and designated as a MassBook Awards Must Read. Crystal’s writing is fueled by a love of history and a passion for the food, language, and culture of Italy. You can find her at crystalking.com.
The allure of Greek and Roman mythology has persisted for millennia, captivating audiences across generations and cultures. These ancient tales, with their larger-than-life characters and timeless themes, continue to resonate in our modern world. From the epic battles of the Trojan War to the cunning exploits of trickster gods, these myths offer a rich tapestry of human experience. They explore the heights of heroism and the depths of tragedy, serving as a mirror to our own hopes, fears, and desires. In an age of rapid technological advancement, these age-old stories still find their way into our books, movies, video games, and even internet memes. The Olympian gods may no longer be worshipped, but their influence on our collective imagination remains undiminished, proving that even in our digital era, the power of myth endures.
I have loved these myths since I was a kid when one of my most treasured books was The Golden Treasury of Myths and Legends by Anne Terry White. Published in 1957, it was a volume of various myths and ancient stories from several cultures that were a gateway into the ancient worlds for many children growing up in the sixties, seventies, and beyond. I read it cover to cover many times, taking in the drama of gods and men interspersed with all the fantastical creatures. It was a book that sparked my imagination and made me yearn to know these people from the past. They were simultaneously larger-than-life but also entirely relatable. Little did I know that these stories would end up being important to my future when I write about ancient Roman gods in Feast of Sorrow (Atria, 2017) and when I retell the myth of Hades and Persephone in my novel In The Garden of Monsters (Mira Books, 2024).
Myth retellings are hot these days, particularly those that give voice to overlooked female characters from antiquity. In In The Garden of Monsters, I’ve taken this concept further by reimagining the familiar Persephone myth. This isn’t the story you remember from childhood—Salvador Dalí certainly never faced off against Hades and Demeter in the original Greek tales. My goal was to present a fresh take on this oft-told narrative, offering readers a sense of familiarity tinged with surprise. The story feels almost known, yet distinctly different from the versions encountered in youth, challenging readers to reconsider what they thought they knew about these ancient myths.
I was curious about the motivations of other authors who chose to retell the myths. I asked the following six authors two questions: Why do they think that the Greek and Roman myths resonate so well with people centuries later? And what drew them to tell the stories they wrote about?
Margaret George, Helen of Troy, (Penguin, 2007)
For starters, the stories themselves can’t be beat—they are filled with unique characters and plot twists, action and tragedy—all the ingredients that appear in bestsellers today. But they also are shapeshifters, not confined to the islands of Greece or Mount Olympus, but are universal and can inhabit our modern world very easily. Hence the many adaptations of the myths, from the musical Hadestown to the Percy Jackson young adult book series to operas like Orfeo to the TV series Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. They range from the highest highbrow to the lowest camp romps. It’s amazing, but today the names of Zeus, Venus, Pluto, and others are known even to first graders.
I was fascinated by the subject of beauty, as in the Oscar Wilde quote “Beauty is a form of genius—is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation…It cannot be questioned. It has divine right of sovereignty.” In mythology, Helen of Troy was the most beautiful woman in the world, the mortal daughter of Zeus. What would it be like to be the embodiment of beauty? I wrote in the first person so I could explore and experience it as nearly real as possible. It would be both a blessing and a curse, I think, because all people can see is the dazzling exterior, and there would be no way to overcome that blinding vision. She would turn people to stone, like Medusa. Only it would not be fatal—or would it? Thousands died in the Trojan War that came about because of Helen and her beauty.
Jennifer Saint, Ariadne, Hera (Flatiron Books, 2021/2024)
Part of the fascination that mythology has always held for me is its longevity. The image of mythology existing as an unbroken chain, linking us in the 21st century to people living more than two thousand years ago feels as magical as anything that happens within the stories themselves. I love to think of women telling their children mythical stories by the light of their hearth-fire, and mothers telling those same stories to their children now in a world that would be almost entirely unrecognizable. Because while the world around us has changed so drastically, I believe that the endurance of mythology shows us that the human heart – in many ways – has not. We still thrill to the stories of adventure and heroism, weep at the losses and heartbreak, rage at injustice and burn with love. The stories survive because they are stories of humanity, and because they contain such complexity and nuance that we can always find a new layer to draw into the light.
Every myth is full of hidden stories, unheard voices, and truths that resonate across the centuries. There is always more to discover about mythology and more that it shows us about ourselves, and for that reason, I think the popularity of these stories isn’t surprising at all.
Hera is one of the most maligned women of Greek mythology – the queen of the gods, married to Zeus and famed for her petty spite and vindictive nature. Stories abound of ‘jealous Hera’ taking out her frustrations about her unfaithful husband on the innocent women he pursues and the illegitimate children that he fathers. We have always viewed Hera through this misogynistic lens; she always embodies the worst of female stereotypes. She occupies a space both tediously domestic as the goddess of wives but also flamboyantly cruel as an ever-present thorn in her husband’s side while she supposedly views all women, mortals, and goddesses alike, as rivals for his affection. To me, this feels like a manifestly wrong way to look at Hera, and indicative of the fact that we’ve always seen her framed in male narratives.
Hera is an angry woman—and patriarchy hates angry women. It teaches us all to stifle that emotion and choke it down—which we see in the stories of Hera as a goddess consumed with bilious rage, an acidic and corrosive substance that churns inside her all the time. Could this anger really come from jealousy? It seems odd to ascribe it that way, given that Hera is forced into her marriage with Zeus and that all depictions of their relationship show it as deeply dysfunctional and toxic. Zeus in the Iliad behaves like an abuser – threatening Hera with violence, controlling her behavior and humiliating her in front of the other Olympians. Hera’s anger, in my opinion, comes not from possessiveness over Zeus but rather from the fact that she is a powerful goddess in her own right and that, as the goddess of marriage, her status is continually undermined by Zeus’ infidelity. It isn’t jealousy, or rivalry with other women, that drives Hera’s behavior. It’s fury at Zeus—the god who is the emblem of the patriarchy—and I had a feeling that her story would look very different if she had the chance to tell it herself.
Luna McNamara, Psyche & Eros (William Morrow, 2023)
I think one reason these stories still resonate today is because we need comfort in these unprecedented times. We are all facing so much uncertainty from the lingering effects of the pandemic, climate change, inflation, and war. The structures of the Greco-Roman myths are instinctively familiar to many, and they remind us that we’re not the first to endure such uncertainty. Ancient myths have a gravity that draws us in – we know how these stories end, even when we’re not sure what will become of our own.
A.D. Rhine (the pseudonym of Ashlee Cowles and Danielle Stinson), Horses of Fire and Daughters of Bronze (Dutton, 2023/2024)
Myths are how we make sense of our world and seek to understand what it means to be human. They are the seeds at the core of every story ever told, which is why we’re not surprised that they still resonate with modern readers thousands of years later. Just take Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the myths that formed our Trojan War duology, Horses of Fire and Daughters of Bronze. These ancient epics have already inspired several reimaginings but countless more stories could still grow from their rich soil because the thing about myths is they are deceptively complex. Every reader will resonate with specific elements and every writer who retells the story will be drawn to some moments and not others. For example, as the daughters of soldiers, the two of us met as teens while living on a U.S. military base in Europe.
When we read the Iliad and the Odyssey as young women, it was never the Greek gods and goddesses that spoke to us–it was the people like Hector and Andromache, who were stand-ins for our fathers and mothers. The warriors defending their homes. The women fighting more hidden battles behind the city walls. The unseen children who grew up surrounded by the drums of war. We cared less about the scheming gods than we did the human actors striving to shape history even when the odds, and fate, seemed stacked against them. That’s why our duology focuses on the epic love story between Hector and Andromache, along with characters who haven’t received as much screentime–Cassandra, Ajax the Great, Sarpedon, and other Trojan allies who came from across ancient Anatolia to fight for a city that wasn’t even theirs. What was their story? Why does the complex geopolitical landscape of the Late Bronze Age–a world on the brink of climate crisis and a coming apocalypse–feel so relevant to us today? These many layers are why we keep coming back to the ancient stories–each new generation brings its unique questions and lived experiences.
We’ve read some beautiful Troy retellings, but we were driven to write Horses of Fire and Daughters of Bronze by the elements we had not yet seen. To start, we wanted to tell the story of Troy from the perspective of the vanquished, not the victors. We’ve heard the Greek side for thousands of years, but what of the Trojans? These mythological characters were likely based on the historical peoples of Anatolia whose culture and identity were all but erased by those who came across the sea. We wanted to bring the distinctive world of the Trojans to life for readers in a way we hadn’t seen before. The history behind the myth was what interested us most, so we dug in deep and discovered that ancient Anatolia was rich with a culture unlike anything seen before. A land that was likely the birthplace of agriculture and that gave us the oldest religious temple/megalith in the world (6 or 7 thousand years before Stonehenge!). It was also exciting to discover that some women in this part of the world may have had a startling degree of autonomy and political influence compared to those in ancient Greece. We wanted to tell the story of the Trojan women in their own words—a story not only of tragedy but of agency and hope.
Emily Hauser, For the Most Beautiful and Mythica (Penguin, 2016/2025)
There are so many layers to this answer, so I’ll just focus on a couple of standout features here. First off, I think it’s because reworking is intrinsic to myth: the lifeblood and the essence of myth is in the re-creation and re-telling. There’s no such thing as a canonical myth (even if the myth’s power is to make you think that there is!). And this brings me to my second point: because myth has the double—and paradoxical—capacity to be used to enforce canonical/patriarchal values, but at the same time to keep space for variant versions, variant voices, it’s such a powerful tool for retelling – from all different kinds of angles, through all different kinds of experiences and perspectives.
I’m particularly interested in retelling the voices/versions of women: Greek myth has such a powerful combination of strong, vibrant female characters who intersect with patriarchal power and challenge it in all kinds of fascinating ways – and yet their stories are also so full of holes, and gaps, that they’re just begging to be re-told in a way that puts their voices back in the picture and validates their experiences.
And that’s what drew me to the Greek myth in the first place, with my first novel For the Most Beautiful in 2016: I thought, “Why has no one ever told the story of Briseis and Chryseis in the Iliad? Why have the women’s tales always been sidelined in the androcentric version of the myth that has been handed down to us—and how can we change that? How can we make sure their voices get recalled from the margins?” It’s been a brilliant journey—and I’m still as fascinated as ever by the power of myth to reclaim women from the margins: in fact, my next non-fiction book (coming out in April 2025 in the US and UK) is called Mythica and does a thrilling deep-dive into how we might go about recovering the real, historical women who lived behind the Greek myths.
Angie Paxton, Seeds, (Rising Action, 2025)
Although Greek and Roman myths are mostly tales of gods and monsters and half-mortals, I think the reason these stories continue to reverberate thousands of years later is because of the stark humanity that’s on display in almost every single one. Take, for example, The Homeric Hymn to Demeter. What mother who has lost, or even contemplated the pain of losing a child, can’t relate to Demeter’s deep grief when Persephone is abducted? And everyone who isolated during the pandemic, can, perhaps, grasp a bit of the deep loneliness that drove Hades to wheel his chariot into a field of summer flowers and snatch up the beautiful young woman he found there. Persephone’s humanity is a little harder to pin down because, ironically, so little is said about the maiden-goddess whose loss is at the heart of this particular story. The Hymn tells us only that Persephone picked flowers with nymphs, was taken to the Underworld against her will, and was happy to be reunited with her mother. Despite that, she ate a pomegranate which sealed her fate as Hades’s consort. The eating of the pomegranate spoke to me of a hungry girl, a girl who wanted.
I wrote my book to figure out what it was that Persephone wanted and what happened to her below ground to make her believe the pomegranate Hades offered would satiate her. In doing so, I found reflections of my humanity, my struggles to be better flickering at me out of almost every character. That, I think, is the true power of these ancient stories and why they have such a hold on us. They help us see, through the lens of the gods, the deep truths of our own human experiences.
A.S. Webb, Daughter of Chaos, MIRA Books (January 14, 2025)
I think the Greek and Roman myths still resonate thousands of years later because of their timeless humanity. While they are often fantastical, including tales of all-powerful gods, physical transformations and death-defying heroics, the heart of these stories beats with our own emotions; love, hope, desire, jealousy, the urge to gain power over one’s fate, to protect one’s family, to live a full and rich life. They hold a mirror to our nature, in all its intricacies, while capturing our imagination with their magic.
I have been obsessed with Greek mythology from an early age and more recently loved the wave of feminist retellings spotlighting the women in these tales. However, I found myself craving the stories I’d grown up with, like the adventures of Heracles, Jason, or Perseus, but with a woman at the helm. I wanted to interact with these myths in a fresh, new way, through the lens of a fierce heroine who creates a myth of her own alongside the heroes of legend.
