I NEVER LIKED YOU ANYWAY, I feel like Colin Clive should be shouting "IT'S ALIVE! IT'S ALIVE!"

I NEVER LIKED YOU ANYWAY
JORDAN KURELLA
Lethe Press
$11.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Eurydice is dead, and hell is a school. She has to learn Hauntings, Baking Disasters, Threads of Fate, and all the other classes a newly dead soul needs to master before they're ready for what comes next. Eurydice is still processing the disastrous relationship that sent her into the land of the dead almost as soon as she was married to the brilliant love of her life, Orpheus.

She'll tell you how he swept her off her feet, and how their polyamorous group swept each other up in music and art and art theory and a life of creation from destruction, but mostly just destruction. But, this isn't their story. Eurydice is dead, and failing all her classes, and she knows Orpheus is coming to get her out. Not that he cares, but that's not what she wants. And, she's the only one who truly knows how Orpheus and Eurydice's story ends.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: The term "disaster bisexual" gets a lot of airplay in this retelling og Orpheus and Eurydice. It very much fits. Everyone.

That's it. That's the review. In spirit, anyway.

I've heard many times over the years, "why can't They just leave {cultural shibboleth} alone? Why do They need to make it about Them?" Because it is about them, and if changing skin colors, genders, clothes, languages makes it more about them in ways they want it to, so be it. The only They who want things to be "left alone" are the "They" who want closet doors swung shut, schools to lead prayer circles, and women to admit they liked it.

This wildly 21st-century setting for the timeless myth of complicated love and its pangs, pains, and consequences, suits the spirit of the Archaic original in exploring the ways communication and courage fail in tandem. It brings the idea of The Grand Passion, The Noble Sacrifice, The Fame of Great and Good Men into sharp, pitiless relief when it's shorn of its togas and chitons, vivified out of its marmoreal bloodless heft into lively, real banter and passionate, full-throated desire.

Is this the best example of a queer myth retelling I've ever read? That would be Patroclus retelling the Iliad. But it is very funny, fun to read, and more like the way I suspect the mythcrafters intended the entire enterprise to play out in the original Bronze-Age dialect. Thev fussy, sexually neutered Myth we're accustomed to, the one They want us to leave alone, was...I promise you this...not the way it was first told.

So revel in this big, bold, bawdy recovery, this excavation of the graveyard of Literature, and drink the cold refreshment of a real, honest, genuinely felt myth for the first time in millennia.