Very Rare Happy Endings – Mythos by Stephen Fry
Not those kind of happy endings, get your mind out of the gutter people!
Mythos was a great book, it brought me back to primary school days where we learnt about Greek Mythology in class and watched Hercules and Xena kick butt on TV.
Fry is a natural story teller, and this anthology of Greek stories was both captivating and insightful. The amount of incest, jealousy and grave consequences was more packed than a season of Game of Thrones. At the same time the depth of the relationships between the Titans, Gods, creatures and human beings has an uncanny reflection of existing social structures that exist in the present.
In total out of the hundreds of stories retold, I could count on one hand the number of conclusions which ended in the main characters alive and happy.
What made this book a page turner, was my curiosity in how each of the stories explains something in real life. Whether it’s:
- How spiders came into being
- Why we have the different seasons
- What makes humans different from animals
- Where narcissism originated
Mythos is collection of origin stories in the Ancient Greek World, and who doesn’t like an original story? Just look at Marvel.
