The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales

In this haunted and luminous collection, Richard Garnett imagines the moment when the old gods finally die. The title story begins with Prometheus, chained to his rock for millennia, suddenly free in a world that has forgotten him entirely. He encounters Elenko, the last priestess of Apollo, hiding on a mountain top from a mob destroying the remnants of ancient faith. Their conversation is a quiet, devastating meditation on what remains when belief fades, on the strange bond between mortals and the divine, on whether love or memory can outlast worship. Garnett ranges across civilizations and centuries: a Pope collects a debt from Lucifer, a Roman emperor commissions a rat-catcher of impossible skill, a philosopher holds discourse with butterflies in his garden, a sage tests his disciples with the promise of eternal life. Each tale operates like a moral fable wrapped in myth, questioning what we sacrifice when we abandon the old stories, and whether something essential is lost in the turning of ages. The prose has a Victorian elegance but carries an unmistakably modern melancholy. These are not celebrations of myth but elegies for it, and they ask the reader to consider what we owe to the gods we no longer believe in, and what we become without them.