If you give Oberon the Irish wolfhound a bath, he’s going to ask you for a story. Fortunately, his human, Atticus, has many centuries of life under his belt as the Iron Druid, and a whole lot of stories to share. Enjoy twelve new short stories from the New York Times bestselling series the Iron Druid Chronicles.
Join Oberon and his Boston terrier buddy, Starbuck, in the tub as they hear about Corrie Ten Boom, Junko Tabei, Francisco de Miranda, Johannes Kepler, and many other figures from history spanning centuries. Sack Rome with King Alaric of the Visigoths or have a think with Auguste Rodin! Let the sparks fly with Michael Faraday or go down to the crossroads with Robert Johnson! And witness the fulfillment of the prophecy regarding the Triple Nonfat Double Bacon Five-Cheese Mocha, wherein a man in white with poor eyesight will craft a liquid paradox…!
Oberon’s Bathtime Stories are a wonderful addition to (or entry into) the Iron Druid Chronicles.
Writing short stories as serial fiction is fun.
Short stories are usually one-off enterprises that show up in magazines or anthologies, but these stories were written once per month in 2024 for my newsletter subscribers, and while each is self-contained, there was also an opportunity to develop a bit of a story arc across several of them that allowed me to finish a piece of esoterica from the Iron Druid Chronicles. In book 3, Hammered, Oberon briefly mentions to Atticus that one day a man will emerge from a secret lab near Seattle with a liquid paradox: the Triple Nonfat Double Bacon Five-Cheese Mocha. Atticus is quickly distracted and the matter is dropped, seemingly forever—there really wasn’t a way for me to revisit it because circling back would do nothing to move the plot forward or develop a character. But as a short story, revisiting that prophecy was tremendously entertaining for me, and it did afford the chance to develop some things once it was located outside of the novels. I’m writing stories again this year but focusing this time on the Druids and a character from the Ink & Sigil series, Gladys Who Has Seen Some Shite, rather than Oberon. All of the stories take place chronologically after the novels, so it does feel like serial fiction.
Empires rise and fall over groceries.
A large part of the joy in writing a character who’s two thousand years old is figuring out where he was and what he was doing throughout history. Since the Druids were wiped out by the Romans, for example, he’d have a huge beef with them, and might be interested in the downfall of Rome. The research for the second story, “The Grocery Sack of Rome,” taught me that the Visigoths were just trying to grow some food, but they were squeezed between the Romans and the Huns, never left in peace, so they had to do something. Sacking Rome worked out for the short term, but it still didn’t give them a land to settle and prosper. They wound up heading to modern-day Spain, gradually morphing and blending with other tribes into the Spanish, and they became a colonial power centuries later—expanding and exploiting (or stealing) resources just as the Romans did, but with bonus religious fervor. It gave me some insight into why men supposedly think about Rome so often. The legacies (and consequences) of that empire are still around today.
History classes leave out the coolest stuff.
While researching the last story in the collection regarding Francisco de Miranda, I became a bit miffed that I’d never heard of him before, because he lived one heck of an interesting life. He dodged the Spanish Inquisition over and over—they wanted him bad—and then he dodged the guillotine during the French Revolution twice. He tried to invade Venezuela to overthrow the Spanish colonial government with like two boats and a handful of dudes, indicating he had a gigantic pair of cojones, but when that didn’t work out, he became the president of the First Republic a bit later and got to use the flag that he’d come up with during the invasion. But it was just one adventure after another with this guy. He liberated the Bahamas during the American Revolution. An empress took him as a lover (Catherine the Great). At the end, he was betrayed by a friend and handed over to the Spanish after he’d dodged them for so long. The guy’s life was a series of action films and yet I’d never heard of him. History textbooks need to do better.
Political science kinda nailed it though.
Back in this whole other century, when I was in college pursuing one of those liberal arts degrees, I took an introductory class where one of the texts was Long Cycles in World Politics by George Modelski. It basically laid out the argument, looking at history, that hegemonic powers like the United States come and go, and judging by the signals—signals we picked up by looking first at The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon—the United States was on its decline and would be giving way to some other hegemonic power in the decades ahead. That was in the early nineties, and speculation abounded: Who would rise to be the new hegemon of the next cycle? Nobody really thought it would be the USSR—they had just shat the bed with Chernobyl and the Berlin Wall crumbled soon afterward. Smart money was on China or Japan. And now…here we are, witnessing the end of America’s global leadership, and it’s pretty clear that China is positioned to lead. In an attempt to address the cycle, I wrote “A Riotous Distraction,” set in September of 1922, the time of The Great Gatsby. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about the immense carelessness of the rich and warned us about them, but in spite of everyone reading it (or maybe twenty percent of everyone because we know lots of folks never did the assigned reading), we let the wealth disparities grow and grow until we have a whole bunch of Tom and Daisy Buchanans now, smashing lives with their casual cruelties and heading to the golf course or sailing away on their yachts. The orcas know what’s up and they’re trying to help, but they can’t save us.
Stories help us process and cope.
Whether it’s reading them or writing them, I take comfort in stories set in various historical periods because people have been enduring (and triumphing over) one kind of nonsense or another for centuries. Writing these stories that spanned history from the Roman empire to the 1970s showed me that people have been surviving and thriving in every era, despite their circumstances, and it helped me manage my angst about the future throughout 2024. Writing and reading them this year is practically necessary to function. And I’m finding that short stories are perfect when my attention span is under assault by the news. These twelve stories—all frame stories where Oberon introduces the bathtime story Atticus tells him—actually work great as bedtime stories (I’ve heard from early readers). I hope you will enjoy, stay hydrated, get enough sleep, and defy fascism.
Kevin Hearne hugs trees, pets doggies, and rocks out to heavy metal. He also thinks tacos are a pretty nifty idea. He is the author of the New York Times bestselling series the Iron Druid Chronicles, the Seven Kennings trilogy that begins with A PLAGUE OF GIANTS, and co-author of the Tales of Pell with Delilah S. Dawson.
(Oberon’s Bathtime Stories is also available on the billionaire’s site but I’m not going to link to a damn billionaire.)
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Fran Wilde says:
Hooray for new Hearnestories!
April 8, 2025 — 3:00 PM