The precipitating incident of Wearing the Lion is that Heracles, possessed by a fury that Hera has sent, kills his three sons. The specter of family annihilation is raised, only to be immediately batted aside. “This wasn’t you,” Heracles’s wife assures him. The entire engine of the plot is finding out who is responsible, because for sure we know it wasn’t Heracles. It’s kind of the fury, but she really didn’t want to do it. It’s mostly Hera, because she ordered the fury (“Take the power Zeus gave him, and make him destroy himself”), but the order was vague and she’s horrified to see how Granny has interpreted her order. So there’s no ill intent here—don’t worry!

The children are still dead, though.

There is, I think, a responsibility that authors have when they dip their toes into real-life horrors, to grapple with those horrors in a thoughtful way, and to keep in mind that while their story is fictional, the people reading it are real, and live in the real world. Somehow, the original Greek myth from I Don’t Even Know What Year BCE gives more of a damn about this than Wearing the Lion. In the myth, Heracles is set to complete his labors as penance for killing his children, because the Greeks understood familicide to be the worst possible crime.

Yes, Heracles was possessed. The children are still dead, though.

And so, the penance.

In Wearing the Lion, Heracles pursues the labors because each one will bring him closer to understanding who did this to him. Because he is not responsible. The truth that he spends most of the book avoiding is the truth of his grief—not the truth of any sort of culpability.

One of the only scenes in the book that feels consequential takes place in the underworld, when Heracles finally gets to see the spirits of his dead children. He tries to explain what happened, why he isn’t at fault, but the children don’t believe him. Finally, he lets them chase him away, recognizing that the best thing he can give them is the safety of his absence. Even in this scene, the children feel like an afterthought. They represent something—the finality of Heracles’s loss, the inevitability of his grief—but are not themselves anything.

Domestic violence

I don’t want to dwell on this because I am tired of thinking about men who do abuse because I have to think about it all the fucking time as a side effect of living in this world. But if you want to write a book about a man who does family annihilation, but it’s not his fault because it’s really the fault of not one woman but two, then it is incumbent upon you as an author to give a shit about how domestic violence looks in the real world, and how often women are blamed for the actions of adjacent violent men.

Such matters are not addressed in Wearing the Lion.

How trauma shapes us

Heracles seems wholly unchanged by having slaughtered his sons while possessed. Like, he’s extremely sad; but nothing else about his personality changes, except that now the sunbeam of his unrelenting kindness shines upon monsters as well as humans. Because he is a monster now too, you see, which helps him recognize that monsters aren’t so bad, if you are just kind to them.

Monstrosity

The first of Heracles’s labors is to kill the Nemean Lion and bring its skin to Eurytheus, the King of All He Surveys. He and Megara get some advice from a one-armed man about where to find the Nemean Lion, and when Heracles finds it, he hugs and pets it until it is friend. “So many killers have come after this lion,” he thinks. “Has nobody ever thought to pet it?” In other words, the lion is not a monster when it is approached with warmth and tenderness, rather than with violence. It’s just a big old kitty! Heracles named it Purrseus.

My problem here is that lions are neither pet kitties nor monsters. They are lions. Human concepts of morality and monstrosity are irrelevant to lions. They exist along a separate moral axis. It is, indeed, wrong to think about lions as monsters within the human context, but the fix isn’t to re-situate them in the alternate human context of pets. They exist within their own context, and as humans that’s something we’re capable of understanding. The goal of a bad lion–human interaction is to integrate the lion back into its own context—the wild—or if that is not possible, then to give it as good and as lion-like a life in human care as we can.

If this seems tediously pedantic, an unwillingness on my part to engage with the book on its own terms, it’s because I found this lion bit emblematic of the book’s insistence on raising issues and then steadfastly refusing to explore them. There are things that are interesting about the interactions of humans and wild animals. Instead of caring about those things, Wearing the Lion insists on forcing every single plot element—including the lion—into the Procrustean bed of its thesis: monsters aren’t so bad if you are just kind to them. If you simply show them love, they’ll fit seamlessly into human contexts and human lives.

This isn’t true. It’s not literally true (of the lion) and it’s not metaphorically true (of the groups monstrosity is historically used as a metaphor to represent).

Metaphor

Monsters are often used in fiction to represent that which isn’t normative. Many of the classic, iconic horror movie monsters and villains are coded as disabled or queer, and their resulting isolation from society is often what has driven them to commit acts of horrific violence.

The primary change Heracles experiences from his brush with monstrosity (which is not his fault, don’t forget!) is to become more welcoming of (other) monsters. But notably, the monsters become part of his life—not the other way around. They join his found family and dedicate themselves to achieving his goals, no matter the risk to their own lives. At the end, two of the creatures have a baby, which represents the hopeful continuation of the new family Heracles has built. Folding themselves into Heracles’s world is an improvement to these creatures, and one that’s easy and joyful, to boot. Really, no adaptation needed!

In real life, changes do happen within the normative context when it widens to include people from the non-normative groups. A society that truly cared about including disabled people would have, to name but two examples, improved air filtration systems and buildings with robust wheelchair access. Queer acceptance doesn’t just mean letting queer folks have access to the same, unchanged, untouched, longstanding institutions of the heteropatriarchy. It means allowing the heteropatriarchy to be dissolved by new understandings of what love and sex and gender can look like. The aim is to collapse exclusionary ideas of normativity, not to give enough hugs that the non-normative group now feels comfortable hanging with the normies.

The Work of Relationships

To the extent that the monsters of Wearing the Lion need anything from Heracles, their needs are straightforwardly guessable, easy to provide, and never in conflict with what Heracles wants to do. The Boar of Erymanthos turns out to be a man who accidentally killed his family; as he’s telling Heracles this story, Heracles has the right words and gestures to put the man at ease. When the Bull leaves the Hind, and she’s grieving his sudden departure, Heracles knows intuitively what she needs from him (“I don’t touch her; I just let her know she is not alone. I stay with her until she is ready to move.”). On the rare occasion that he doesn’t meet their needs, they understand that it’s because he was in pain, and readily forgive him without further discussion required.

Heracles’s relationship with Megara does change, but not in a way that requires a conversation about the new boundaries of what they are to each other. At some point, they part ways, each to pursue their own methods of finding justice. Their parting goes like this:

My wife kisses me. Our mouths don’t fit together, and I tilt my head, trying to make it work. It’s like one of us grew, or both of us shrank. I keep repeating what my lips used to do, and none of it works.

It’s over before I can fix it.

Only retroactively does it become clear this parting was a break-up. They were married long enough to have three sons, but they both just, somehow, intuit that things are over between them and they’re going to move on. When Megara shows back up, she’s with Heracles’s nephew Iolaus, something that upsets Heracles but not enough for him to ask her about it or process it in any way with anyone.

Our second protagonist, Hera, is the object of unconditional forgiveness by all her loved ones she’s wronged. In the first third of the book, Hera encounters her best friend, Até, whom Zeus banished from Olympus twenty-eight years ago. Até is all geared up to help Hera get revenge on Zeus, her loyalty unshaken by those twenty-eight years.

“All that time, I left you here. You were in my entourage. You were doing my bidding when he brought the hammer down on you….You should be furious at me. You should be raining ruin on every temple that bears my name. You’re not even raising your voice. Why don’t you hate me?”

“I see what he did to you,” [Até] says, her hands moving as though to cup my cheeks, and then stopping. “This isn’t you. He’ll pay for making you doubt yourself.”

Although the book argues that it is important for Hera to be accountable to those she harmed, that accountability isn’t something anyone else demands of her. Até is on her side after three decades of being ignored. Granny comes back to Olympus after Hera accidentally made her do child murder, and gives Hera a tender hug. Ares pretends to be launching a war for control of Olympus, only to reveal that he had Hera’s best interests in mind all along.

The book’s goal here, I think, is an Edenic view of family, that the people you love and bring into your life and prioritize will know you so fully that it will always be easy and joyful between you. It’s theoretically a nice idea, except that it ignores all the things about relationships that make them beautiful. Yes, it’s amazing when someone knows you so well that they know what you need without asking—but the amazing bit is all the time and love they put into learning you. Human needs are only intuitive in broad strokes. The specifics—death anniversaries, dietary restrictions, favorite media, level of desired birthday celebration—have to be learned and negotiated. The ways my loved ones are different from me help me grow, in myself and in relationship to them. Those moments of friction aren’t nuisances to be dismissed. They’re the whole point.

Coda: Children, Again

After the Nemean lion incident, we learn that the one-armed man who advised Heracles and Megara on how to find the lion is actually very wicked. Hera narrates:

It’s easy to track down the one-armed man who has spent years pretending to build his house, and who has used that affable ruse to trick so many people into the jaws of the Lion of Nemea. With the lion gone, he’s beginning to do the dirty work himself.

(This doesn’t make any sense and how is that an affable ruse, and what is he killing the people for, and where is he finding the people now to kill them and what are you talking about)

I break down his front door with an omen. One of the blunt omens. He’s robbed too many families of fathers. He will turn his house into a home for broken families, where babies can grow up better than they would otherwise have. He will go hungry before any wet nurse does.

It does the deed. He’s soliciting needy mothers that very dawn.

The book’s solution to “serial killer” is that he’ll now run a home for indigent families. Do needy mothers want to move in with a serial killer? Will it be beneficial for their children to be raised in such an environment? I don’t know, and Wearing the Lion doesn’t care. “Fixing people’s problems does not fix a god’s problems,” Hera reflects, and moves on to her own problems, which are evidently knottier than the famously easy-to-solve problem of the social safety net.

It’s a move that typifies the book’s whole approach to conflict. Wearing the Lion never met a problem it couldn’t solve with a group hug. The messy, jagged edges of personhood, relationships, and conflict are sanded down to fit an empty politics of niceness. What Wiswell opts to leave behind on the floor is, for me, everything interesting and vital about the human experience.

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