About three decades ago, the idea occurred to me to write a cycle of at least three novels based on the mythology of the “House of Atreus.”  This family, the family of Agamemnon and  Menelaus, of Orestes and Elektra, appears for the first time in Homer’s Iliad. The Odyssey tells the story of Agamemnon’s murder by his wife, Clytemnestra, and the events that follow. The larger story of the “Tantalides”—the descendants of Tantalus, including the houses of Atreus and hid brother Thyestes, is elaborated in later Greek literature, including works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Heraclitus, and many others. 

I envisioned a story retold in a contemporary context, with American characters, and relevant to current situations and themes. The possible scale of such a work intrigued me.  In my opinion, the story gains interest from being told in detail. So, I was attracted to the concept of  a series.

But what  attracted me to the story of the  ”Tantalides” in the first place?

A couple of things: first, was the intensity of the violence and family dysfunction revealed in these epic tales. In all of western literature there is little (and perhaps nothing) to exceed it for sheer horror.  We are accustomed to encounter bad behavior among the creatures of mythology. But the demented evils of the Tantalides, taken together, put them almost in a class by themselves—a class that only our contemporary evils, our, 20th and 21st-century realities seem likely to eclipse. It is, in fact, the shocking violence of the mythology that give it its modern ring of truth.

Second, it seemed to me that the mythology might have something to say to the people of our own time. Exactly what that something is, or may be, can only be discerned by the living, and revealed in the literature of our day. This is my attempt to make that happen.

More to follow.