Neon Gods

In the Olympian Pantheon, Hades is the god of death and the Underworld and the brother of Zeus and Poseidon. Zeus is a frequent philanderer who abuses mortal women and often alienates his wife, Hera. The River Styx is the boundary between the mortal realm and the Underworld, with Charon the ferryman serving as the immortal being responsible for shepherding dead souls to the afterlife. Hades also owns a fearsome dog, the three-headed hound Cerberus.

In myth, Hades and Zeus agree that Persephone will be Hades’s spouse. They use a particularly beautiful flower to lure her underground. Demeter, the goddess of the harvest and Persephone’s mother, is outraged by the act and plunges the world into darkness and winter in her despair. Persephone has been warned that consuming food in the Underworld will bind her to it, but before she returns to her mother, she eats some pomegranate seeds. This results in a compromise wherein Persephone spends part of the year—spring and summer—above with her mother and the rest of the year with Hades, which creates fall and winter.

Robert reworks aspects of the Hades and Persephone myth to craft alternate arguments about gender, agency, and power. Zeus is cast as a villain because of his tendency to use women sexually and then disregard them, and Hades is cast as a political foil and hated rival. Persephone chooses pomegranate for her safe word, underlying that in this retelling, her life in the Underworld of the lower city is a free choice. Similarly, while she is enchanted by the flowers in the greenhouse, she is offered free access to them rather than being deceived or tricked. Hades is dedicated to consent and agency, unlike Zeus. Demeter’s threats to the food supply are rooted less in maternal love and more in her own role as an ambitious ruler, making her more of a force in her own right. Demeter is the work’s deceptive figure since she only reveals her original plan to topple Zeus after Persephone returns to the upper city at the end of the novel. Hades and Persephone become equal partners, and separation from her family is not a source of tragedy or loss.

Robert’s other characters also have mythological counterparts and romantic narratives. In mythology, Eros is the son of Aphrodite, and he carries out tasks for her, as he does in the novel. In mythology, Psyche is a human woman and not a sister of Persephone, but her presence foreshadows a romantic relationship with Eros, just as in Greek mythology. Orpheus was a famed mortal musician whose love for Eurydice ends in tragedy when she is lost to him in the Underworld. Robert retells this myth by having Eurydice flee to Hades, with Charon serving as her personal ferryman. Callisto’s temperamental personality in the novel relates to her tempestuous relationship with Zeus in myth.