JOHN WISWELL: FIVE THINGS I LEARNED WRITING WEARING THE LION

Heracles was raised to revere his Auntie Hera, Goddess of Family. As he grows up to become the strongest man in the world, he spreads word of her glory and raises a family of his own. Then an Olympian God strikes, driving him mad and destroying his family. Shattered, Heracles embarks on a series of labors, confronting the greatest minds and monsters in the world to find which Olympian is responsible. The only god he still trusts is Auntie Hera.

There’s one problem: Hera is the one responsible, and she’ll do anything to hide the truth. She’s always detested Heracles, the illegitimate child of her husband Zeus. As Goddess of Family, Heracles is a living insult to her entire being. She only realized what she’s set in motion once it was too late, and now Heracles discovering the truth would destroy them both. She must keep him from solving the mystery. Desperate, she stalls by sending him off to face impossible monsters, but each time he winds up adding another creature to a newfound family. A family that could wage war against the entire heavens.

Yes, this is a story where Heracles tries to befriend every bloodthirsty monster in the world.

The legend of Heracles was one of the first things my parents read to me, and I definitely pretended to be him as I ran shirtless around my backyard. As I grew up, I wondered about all the gaps in those stories, like why Heracles wasn’t more haunted by his actions, and where the heck Hera went after starting everything. Writing this book was about finding a beating heart in the mythology. I learned a lot, including…

MY FAVORITE GREEK HISTORIAN WAS A FRAUD

Ever since college, I’ve loved this little green book called The Library by Apollodorus, translated by the famous James George Frazer. The Library is a concise collection of Greek myths, often telling an entire myth in a couple of pages. It’s so plain, never pausing to dwell on the magnitude of what’s happening. The old generation of gods has been wiped out? Next. A huge war comes to a bloody conclusion? Next.

But “Apollodorus” was a popular name in ancient Greece, and sometimes Romans would write under that name when they wanted to sound authentic. The “Apollodorus” who wrote The Library was an impersonator, living centuries after the time of the actual Greek Apollodorus, and long after the time of Homer and Sophocles. Historians often call him “Pseudo-Apollodorus.” He was trying to garner fame by collecting the great Greek stories in a single space—a library, of sorts—while also mixing some Roman values into them. Such cultural prickles wound up influencing my book in ways I won’t spoil.

HERACLES HAD A TWIN BROTHER (WHO WASN’T A DEMIGOD)

Heracles’s story is weird from his very conception. One day Zeus spied an attractive queen named Alcmene. Being the absolute worst, Zeus decided to woo her by shapeshifting to look like her husband, Amphitryon. That night, Alcmene conceived the demigod Heracles, Zeus’s new favorite son. You’d think the story would end there, with everyone mad at Zeus. But no.

It turns out that Alcmene and Amphitryon were super into it. They hopped into bed and, in defiance of medical science, conceived a second child immediately. This child was Iphicles, totally mortal, no superpowers whatsoever. Iphicles and Heracles coexisted as wombmates, and then Iphicles immediately cut in line to be born first.

If you think this is weird, imagine being Hera: both Zeus’s wife *and* Goddess of Fertility, meaning her phone was blowing up all night.

EVERYBODY YADDA-YADDAS THE GIANT BULL

One of the issues with Heracles retellings is that after a few labors, the audience gets tired of him punching yet another giant animal. It starts with an invincible lion and then moves to a many-headed hydra. After that, do you really care that he’s fighting a really big boar?

So many versions turn the middle labors into a montage. He chases a deer, he fights a bull, who cares, what else is on? For a story that is essentially about twelve amazing feats, storytellers clearly find some more amazing than others. It actually gets funny, looking out for which labors an author skips over.

If you know my writing, you know I love monsters. My answer in all these cases was to explore the personality of the creatures. What is life like for a boar on an otherwise desolate and abandoned mountain? Which other hunters have come after it before? By treating the creatures as characters, many of the middle labors became my favorites. Having a Heracles who collected the animals in a found family rather than fighting them allowed so much more meaning to pour out.

HERACLES’S WIFE DOESN’T HAVE TO DIE

Among the many retellings, Megara often lives! My novel pivoted the moment I realized this. The classic story is that Heracles is driven mad by the Furies, and in his madness he slays his wife and children. He destroys the very family life that Hera is supposed to enshrine and protect. Everything he loved is gone.

But as I read more historians and versions of the Heracles myth, his wife Megara kept popping up. One time, she saw him off on his labors and wished him luck. Then at the end of Heracles’s labors, she appeared and married Heracles’s nephew. There was even an anonymous poem about Megara commiserating with Heracles’s mother over how their family was destroyed.

She was very busy for a dead person.

Megara’s fate changed wildly depending on who was telling it. Realizing that I wasn’t mythologically obligated to fridge Megara changed how I breathed. The entire book pivoted. While grief over loss is important to Wearing The Lion, this change allowed both parents to process the grief in different ways. I got to dig into the clash of their attempts to help each other,  how they succeeded, and how they failed. The entire arc of the book changed with Megara’s influence.

NAMES MEAN THINGS? WHAT A CONCEPT!

Heracles wasn’t born with that name. He was “Alcides,” named after an ancestor of the mortal family. There are several explanations for why he took up his new name, but it always means the same thing: “Glory of Hera.” It carried a bitter irony, given how much Hera hated him.

This scheme of new names with serious meanings runs through Ancient Greece. Take Diomedes as an example. Meaning “Cunning of the Gods,” it was a powerful name, suggesting a brilliant tactician. That’s why everybody wanted to be Diomedes. Heracles tangled with a Diomedes who owned man-eating horses. A while later, another Diomedes popped up alongside Odysseus and Achilles in the Trojan War. Yet another Diomedes tried to conquer Hindu-Kush around 95 BCE.

They all wanted the cool name. Every kid on the playground wants to be Spider-Man.

This practice was so common that Heracles wasn’t even the only “Heracles.” Other people sought to suck up to Hera for luck.

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About John Wiswell:  John Wiswell is a disabled writer who lives where New York keeps all its trees. He won the 2021 Nebula Award for Short Fiction for his story, “Open House on Haunted Hill,” and the 2022 Locus Award for Best Novelette for “That Story Isn’t The Story.” He has also been a finalist for the Hugo Award, British Fantasy Award, and World Fantasy Award. He is the author of Someone You Can Build a Nest In, a Nebula award winner and Year’s Best pick by NPR and The Washington Post, and Wearing the Lion. He can be found making too many puns and discussing craft on his Substack, johnwiswell.substack.com.

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