The surprising third entry in Wammack’s Beginning of Civilization series continues imagining the root tales and myths of civilization with a welcome emphasis on the human, not the divine. As the title suggests, Dionysus & Hestia concerns the gods of the ancient Greek pantheon, but Wammack never elevates the likes of Zeus, Poseidon, Hades, and co. over us mortals. Rather, this entry follows the Titan Dionysus’s clever campaign to rebrand the deeply human Olympians as the Nephilim, an upper class so upper they rule without sullying their hands with the details. “Rebrand” might sound too 21st-century prosaic for a story that involves foundational myths like Hades’s abduction of Persephone and the Centaur Chiron living with a birth defect described by Apollo as a “growth from his back that has the appearance of a horse’s hindquarters.” But it’s in the spirit of this entry, as the Olympians—led by Dionysus and Chief-of-Chiefs Hestia and her Executive Assistant Philyra—divvy up their world in pointedly contemporary management-speak. Hades, for example, is named “Chief-of-Metals, Mining, and Manufacturing position,” or “CoM3.”

Wammack again examines moments where civilization flowers. This time, the leap involves class, as the Olympians remove themselves from the rabble, building towers, demanding tribute, and elevating lords to run things, distracting themselves with schemes and orgies. Without losing sight of the dawn-of-humanity stakes, Wammack emphasizes the meetings that keep things running as a cast of Olympians, Titans, and Oceanids makes hilariously un-godly declarations like “We just need some organizational changes.”

The narration, though, remains at an Olympian remove, emulating the declarative nature of ancient texts. The novel is heftily long, purposefully lacking much interiority but packed with incident, discussion, and philosophical inquiry, especially on the part of Dionysus, a figure of real pathos. Much of this is funny, presented in brisk scenes often powered by moral outrage, especially once people begin to think of the Olympians as gods—a development the gods prove happy to exploit and that Wammack, in his provocative, wholly original way, demonstrates as tragic.

Takeaway: Boldly satiric epic novel of the evolution of Olympian godhood.

Comparable Titles: Marie Phillips’s Gods Behaving Badly, Steven Mithen’s After the Ice.

Production grades
Cover: B
Design and typography: A-
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A-
Marketing copy: A-