It’s no surprise that Melvin Burgess, author of Junk and many other powerful novels for teenagers, has chosen the Norse god Loki as the subject of his first adult novel: questioning, tricksy, gender-bending and anti-authority, Loki is perhaps the quintessential teen.
We have not been short of treatments of Norse myth in fiction over the last few years. AS Byatt’s Ragnarok was exhilarating, richly wrought, written through the lens of her child self’s encounters, and with a focus on the end of the world. More recently, Neil Gaiman, in Norse Mythology, has thrown impish humour into the mix. Both dealt with the myths canonically, not straying from established narratives.
