WEARING THE LION, sophomore novel from 2024 Nebula Award-winner AND Best First-Novel Locus Award winner John Wiswell

WEARING THE LION
JOHN WISWELL
DAW Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$16.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: This second novel from Nebula Award-winning John Wiswell brings a humanizing, redemptive touch to the Hercules story in this mythological fantasy for fans of Jennifer Saint and Elodie Harper

Heracles, hero of Greece, dedicates all his feats to Hera, goddess of family. Heracles’ mother raised him to revere Hera, as her attempt to avoid the goddess’ wrath. Unbeknownst to Heracles, he is yet another child Hera’s husband, Zeus, had out of wedlock.

Hera loathes every minute of Heracles’ devotion. She finally snaps and sends the Furies to make Heracles kill himself. But the moment Heracles goes mad, his children playfully ambush him, and he slays them instead. When the madness fades, Heracles’s wife, Megara, convinces him to seek revenge. Together they’ll hunt the Furies and learn which god did this.

Believing Hera is the only god he can still trust, Heracles prays to Hera, who is wracked with guilt over killing his children. To mislead Heracles, Hera sends him on monster-slaying quests, but he is too traumatized to enact more violence. Instead, Heracles cares for the Nemean lion, cures the illness of the Lernaean hydra, and bonds with Crete’s giant bull.

Hera struggles with her role in Heracles life as Heracles begins to heal psychologically by connecting with the monsters—while also amassing an army that could lay siege to Olympos.

Nebula Award-winning author John Wiswell brings his signature humanizing touch to the Hercules story, forever changing the way we understand the man behind the myth—and the goddess reluctantly bound to him.

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

My Review: "Mythology" might be one of the English language's biggest mistakes or disservices or just downright screw-ups of all time. It has a lot of competition, to be sure...you'll have your own ideas about that, I don't need to elaborate...but walling off the best possible way to understand human nature's thorniest problems behind this etymological fence:

mythology(n.) early 15c., "exposition of myths, the investigation and interpretation of myths," from Late Latin mythologia, from Greek mythologia "legendary lore, a telling of mythic legends; a legend, story, tale," from mythos "myth" (a word of unknown origin; see myth) + -logia (see -logy "study"). Meaning "a body or system of myths" is recorded by 1781. (etymonline)

...is wasteful, even dangerous. Thank goodness we're embracing retellings, modernizations, again. And even more praises be sung to the Divine that John Wiswell joined the chorus.

What Author Wiswell excels at in this story is upending your expectations...seems to be a trope in this case, go read my review of Someone to Build a Nest In, 2024 Nebula Award-winner AND Best First-Novel Locus Award winner that it is...of what love, grief, trust, and faith mean, require, and offer to you. Hera and Herakles, the Fury, the monsters, all get bound in unquestioned roles, then get jailbroken by Author Wiswell's perspective shift. It's a great way to de-mythologize a violent and triumphalist myth, putting it into a twenty-first centurian's comfort zone while making its subtexts very sharp. That contrast between the meaning we've learned to associate with the multiple millennia of unacknowledged retellings of Heracles' story and what Author Wiswell does with it is *chef's kiss* piquant.

Introducing a goddess to the idea of accountability is permaybehaps the most satisfying part of Author Wiswell's reimaging of the tale. That a being who was, until now, entirely untouched by any sense that her actions having consequences in others' lives was in any way a cause for her own emotional involvement is so in keeping with this #MeToo moment. It's also in sharp contrast...I'd even say rebuke...to the rising tide of publicly-flaunted bigotry and intolerance. Hera never faces up to the devastation her setting of the Furies on Herakles for something simply not his (Zeus's infidelity that resulted in his birth) doing caused in the original. Of course not! Divine beings aren't subject to rules like mere mortals are, say the myths of a culture that contended their royals are divine.

The entire story revolves around that most current of cultural concerns, accountability. Herakles facing up to his murderous rampage's consequences, then his puruit of revenge's limitations; Hera to her misuse of power and her misplaced anger; "Granny" the Fury's, well...existence; all in the end are changed in some very relatable, and pretty satisfying, ways. How that happens with Hera and Herakles as equally unreliable narrators is predictably sort-of stop-and-start in effect on the pacing. It becomes a bit more choppy than I as a reader prefer. My one other complaint, more of a whine actually, is that including all twelve canonical Labors made the read slower than was optimal for a humorous tale. Brevity is the soul of wit became a maxim instead of a truism because its self-evidence is actionable.

So the missing half-star is explained. The four-and-a-half remaining are slathered in the cream-cheese-and-pecan frosting of contentment. The happiness I felt at Herakles loving the Nemean Lion...the way every act of violence (after the inciting act) results in Hera, and Heracles, figuring out their wounds and their capacity to endure and even recover from them...the sly, quiet side-eye humor...I was badly in need of them all.

Dunno about y'all, but fiction that transmutes an ancient tale of violence and rage and hate into one of healing and chuckles feels damn close to miraculously soothing in my 2025 world.

Author Wiswell, thank you. I needed this story at this moment and you made it so good to read I couldn't stop.