Nebula Award-winning author of Someone You Can Build a Nest In John Wiswell brings a humanizing and humorous touch to the Hercules story, forever changing the way we understand the man behind the myth—and the goddess reluctantly bound to him
Sometimes a goddess's worst enemy is her biggest fan.
Heracles, hero of Greece, dedicates all his feats to the goddess Hera. If only he knew that his very face is an insult to her...as he is yet another child that Hera’s dipshit husband, Zeus, had out of wedlock.
“Auntie Hera” loathes every minute of Heracles’ devotion, until she snaps and causes an unspeakably tragic accident: the death of Heracles' children. Plunged into grief and desperate for revenge, Heracles is determined to find the god that did this.
Wracked with guilt and desperate to save face, Hera distracts Heracles with monster-slaying quests, only to find that he is too traumatized to enact more violence. Instead, Heracles cares for the Nemean lion, bonds with the Lernaean hydra, and heeds the Ceryneian hind.
Each challenge adds a new monster to Heracles' newfound family. A family that just might lay siege to Mount Olympos.
Shesheshen has made a mistake fatal to all monsters: she's fallen in love.
Shesheshen is a shapeshifter, who happily resides as an amorphous lump at the bottom of a ruined manor. When her rest is interrupted by hunters intent on murdering her, she constructs a body from the remains of past meals: a metal chain for a backbone, borrowed bones for limbs, and a bear trap as an extra mouth.
However, the hunters chase Shesheshen out of her home and off a cliff. Badly hurt, she’s found and nursed back to health by Homily, a warm-hearted human, who has mistaken Shesheshen as a fellow human. Homily is kind and nurturing and would make an excellent co-parent: an ideal place to lay Shesheshen’s eggs so their young could devour Homily from the inside out. But as they grow close, she realizes humans don’t think about love that way.
Shesheshen hates keeping her identity secret from Homily, but just as she’s about to confess, Homily reveals why she’s in the area: she’s hunting a shapeshifting monster that supposedly cursed her family. Has Shesheshen seen it anywhere?
Eating her girlfriend isn’t an option. Shesheshen didn’t curse anyone, but to give herself and Homily a chance at happiness, she has to figure out why Homily’s twisted family thinks she did. As the hunt for the monster becomes increasingly deadly, Shesheshen must unearth the truth quickly, or soon both of their lives will be at risk.
And the bigger challenge remains: surviving her toxic in-laws long enough to learn to build a life with, rather than in, the love of her life.
