With the disclaimer that I’m not into Homeric scholarship at all so this is just me pulling things out of thin air and overall vibes, but I love the idea of the Odyssey reimagined as a horror story. Something crawls out of the carnage of the Trojan War and drags itself home across a monster-infested Mediterranean, and past a certain point that thing is more revenant than living human. Again, this is more fanfiction than textual interpretation, so please refrain from being annoying in the notes.
Enough feminist retellings of Greek Classics, I want cosmic horror retellings that really lean into the idea that everyone is powerless against their fates and the gods. Everyone is already dead, Odysseus died a long time ago, but Athena won’t let him die, and Penelope weaves and undoes and weaves again and waits for the shambling corpse of her husband to make its way home and lie down next to hers, and perhaps what happened to Hector and Achilles was a mercy after all?
I love when characters are biologically alive, but narratively dead, when they passed the narrative event horizon a long time ago and now the only thing left is their metaphorical reanimated corpse being dragged through the remainder of the story, and I love when this is a deliberate literary device to hammer in the tragedy and horror of the event that marked the point of no return for their character arc.
