Seamus Sullivan is joining us today to talk about his novel, Daedalus is Dead. Here’s the publisher’s description:
A delirious and gripping story of fatherhood and masculinity, told through the reimagined Greek myth of Daedalus, Icarus, King Minos, Ariadne, and the Minotaur.
Daedalus of Crete is many things: The greatest architect in the world. The constructor of the Labyrinth that imprisoned the Minotaur. And the grieving father of Icarus, who plunged into the sea as father and son flew from the grasp of the tyrannical King Minos.
Now, Daedalus seeks to reunite with Icarus in the Underworld, even as he revisits his own memories of Crete, hoping to understand what went so terribly wrong at the end of his son’s life. Daedalus will confront any terror to see Icarus again—whether it’s the cruel punishments of Tartarus, the cunning Queen Persephone, or the insatiable ghost of the Minotaur.
But the truth, stalking Daedalus in the labyrinth of his own heart, might be too monstrous for him to bear.
What’s Seamus’ favorite bit?
When I first drafted Daedalus is Dead, I didn’t include a chapter where we see Daedalus building the Labyrinth. The very idea smacked of prequelitis, and would drain my Labyrinth, which I wanted to make existentially frightening, of its mystery and terror. (Formative pop culture memory: sitting in a movie theater watching the Prometheus trailer and thinking Oh, God, no, they’re explaining the xenomorphs.)
But then my friend Emily from writing workshop, an exceptional writer, volunteered a characteristically potent image: little Asterion, the bull-headed boy who would soon be christened the Minotaur, toddling among the limestone blocks of the Labyrinth-in-progress, playing with the off-duty construction crew. Friends, if your writing group contains an Emily, consider yourselves very lucky.
So as my story continued to grow from a novelette to a short novella to a long one, I said to hell with it and wrote my Labyrinth-under-construction chapter, which became the saddest, strangest chapter in a sad, strange book. Because this chapter was a later addition, many of the book’s themes and ideas crystallized here, telling the particulars of Daedalus’s story in microcosm.
Little Asterion was key to this. Early on, I had considered making my version of the Minotaur sadistic and cunning, with a spark of malign divinity. Then I realized it would be scarier, and truer to life, if he was simply a guileless, mistreated kid who happened to have the head of a flesh-eating bull. I took a stab at writing down the version of Asterion conjured by my friend’s suggestion:
“His fur was nearly the same ghostly shade as our local limestone. Already he looked at home here. He lifted his arms until the foreman picked him up and carried him around the nursery. As they walked, Asterion reached out and ran his plump fingers along the mosaic tiles. Pasiphaë, I’d heard, wouldn’t pick her son up, or venture into the same room as him.
‘He’s only a little boy,’ said Ariadne. She called Asterion’s name, and he wiggled out of the foreman’s arms and ran to her.”
After Asterion has grown for a few months, and King Minos has fed his bullish stepson the remains of a few prisoners, here’s how Daedalus comes to describe him:
“It took a moment to spot him now, white fur against white stone. A glimpse of movement, the click of a hoof, and there he was, seeming to spring from the rock itself. An ageless fiend, hewn from the earth with the rest of the place. We threw fragments of stones to drive him off. When we pushed him or slapped at him now, he snorted with laughter and returned the blow. He cracked a man’s skull that way, thinking it was a game.”
Asterion’s bigger, stronger, and more carnivorous now, sure, but he’s also the focus of a sort of feedback loop of cruelty. Daedalus and the workers mistreat him, then project their own guilt and shame onto him, reasoning that he must be monstrous to deserve the mistreatment.
(Man, it would suck if we treated entire groups of people this way in the real world, wouldn’t it? To speak to one of the most urgent examples of this, here’s where I’ll signal-boost Vajra Chandrasekara’s recent post with some links where you can, and should, offer aid to some of the people the US government is helping to kill en masse in Gaza. If you live in the US, I’m also going to ask you to call your reps today and ask them to cosponsor HR 3565, the Block the Bombs Act.)
There are lots of other little touches that I’m happy with. Daedalus’s frequent use of the word “we” to diffuse responsibility, more often here than in any other chapter. His increasingly sweaty attempts to compartmentalize as he describes the Labyrinth:
“It was a public safety measure, a vessel to hold Minos’s cruelty. It had an inside, where the danger was, and an outside, where we were.”
But I’m happiest with the chapter’s arc (if “happy” is the right word here), wherein every character steadily loses some of their humanity by denying Asterion his, until, by chapter’s end, no one is willing to call him by his proper name anymore. I did my best to make the chapter’s last sentence the most chilling in the book.
Stay strong, my friends. Let’s not pretend the Labyrinth we’re in right now is keeping anyone safe. Work towards everyone’s extrication, however you can, until the day we bring this place down.
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BIO:
Seamus Sullivan’s (he/him) fiction has appeared in Terraform and in the print anthology Terraform: Watch/Worlds/Burn. He sometimes reviews books for Strange Horizons. Sullivan writes about parenthood, mythology, superheroes, Americana, memory, loneliness and mortality. He has lectured about storytelling computer games and owns more comics than is practical. He lives in Jersey City with his family. Daedalus is Dead is his first book.