The best mythic fiction exploring complex psychology

I can’t talk Mythic Fiction without a shout-out to the man who penned the phrase. It’s beyond Urban Fantasy—mythic archetypes, mystery, magic, and toe-curling mayhem. When Celtic fiddler, Lizzie Mahone, gets stranded on a lonely country road at midnight, she has no idea how her life will change. Widdershins is a dark dip into the faerie realm that brings us face-to-face with freakish Bogans—nasty-pants faeries with sewer-mouths—faerie courts in shopping malls, and gripping psychological terror when Jilly Coppercorn gets trapped in a sinister world with her childhood abuser. Politics is rampant. At its core is the conflict between the settler fae and the Indigenous animal people. Behind it lurks love and hope. 

I read this book twice, cover-to-cover and back-to-back. First, to find out what happens to our feisty Métis hero, Joan of Arcand, and then again to savor Dimaline’s lyrical writing. When Mere (her grandmother) is murdered by a wolfish shape-shifting creature—a rogarou—we find ourselves trapped in a mythic Métis world. “A dog, a man, a wolf. He was clothed, he was naked in his fur, he wore moccasins to jig.” Carrying a ground-up salt bone for protection, Joan ventures into the Empire of Wild to slay the rogarou who killed Mere and reclaim her husband. Like her hero, Dimaline is brave and fearless, pouring history, politics, and religion into her cauldron, then stirring with a branch of magic realism and psychological terror. Dimaline is my hero.

Rice delves into the beating heart of the myth, illuminating its inner secrets in Louie’s relentless, lyrical monologue. The lonely Lestat makes Louie as his companion then jealously keeps him from meeting other vampires. Such emotional abuse. Finally free, Louie falls madly in love with Armand in Paris. In one of my favorite scenes Armand says, “I want you. I want you more than anything in the world.” This love and longing beats at the ironic core of Rice’s book—Dead Men Loving. In the lunatic Lestat, and the broody Louie, I see shades of my own boys—Estrada and his lover, Michael Stryker. Their relentless psychological game ensues through all five of my novels.

Once upon a time in the deep woods, a kind woman invited twelve family members and friends to Thanksgiving dinner. But not burning the turkey became the least of her worries. Wolf at the Door is a kick-ass nightmare, a ghoulish debut novella that will keep you sitting rigid in bed with your eyes and ears wide, long after its done. You may never walk in the woods again. How will our hero save her dinner guests from becoming the main course for two brutally vicious werewolves who just happen to be the neighbors? How well do you know the couple next door?

Coraline is a bored little girl who lives in an old gothic house inhabited by eccentric people far cooler than her parents. She is bold, smart-alecky, and curious. That’s how she meets the other mother, the beldame, a monster who can suck a child’s soul out through her eyeballs. She keeps them in a glass marble. All the beldame leaves behind is a filmy shell with black button eyes that she sews in with a long needle and black thread. The beldame is archetypal: D’sonoqua the child-stealer, Cinderella’s abusive stepmother, Snow White’s jealous queen, Hansel and Gretel’s cannibal witch. Every nightmare monster imaginable. How will Coraline outwit the beldame at her own psychological game?