Daedalus Is Dead by Seamus Sullivan Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy, mythology, retellings
Pages: 176
Published by Tordotcom on September 30, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
A delirious and gripping story of fatherhood and masculinity, told through the reimagined destinies of Greek mythic figures Daedalus, Icarus, King Minos, 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—plunged into the sea as father and son flew from the grasp of the tyrannical King Minos.
Now that Daedalus is dead, he seeks to reunite with Icarus in the Underworld. Daedalus will confront any terror to see his son again—whether it be the vengeful spirit of Minos, the cunning Queen Persephone, or even the insatiable ghost of the Minotaur.
But a shocking realization follows in his wake. As Daedalus encounters the souls from his past, he begins to worry that his identity as a husband and father, mentor and friend was all a lie. And that the truth, stalking him in the labyrinth of his own heart, might be too monstrous for him to bear.
My Review:
Something about that title probably rings a bell. In some form or another, the Greek myth about Icarus is well known and subject to oodles of interpretation – all of which somehow come back to overwhelming ambition and pride going very much before a really HUGE fall. This is, actually, sorta/kinda that kind of story, but it’s not Icarus that suffers from either of those conditions.
It’s his father, Daedalus, whose ambition overcame his good sense and whose pride keeps coming before some very big falls. Howsomever, even Daedalus’ story is still all about Icarus. Or at least that’s the way that Daedalus tells the story, even if, or especially because, Daedalus leaves a whole heaping helping of the details out of his narrative.
Which is an extremely unreliable one. Because Daedalus paints every line of the story of his life, his death, and even his afterlife as being in pursuit of the soul of his son so that Daedalus can get closure on why his son flew too close to the sun in spite of being instructed not to.
But he didn’t. Icarus flew high, the wax holding his wings together melted, and he fell, fast and far and broke upon the sea. Daedalus wants to believe that Icarus was intoxicated with freedom, and too young to understand the consequences of his soaring flight.
As we get to know Daedalus, we start to wonder whether or not Icarus knew exactly what he was doing. That the person he was snatching his freedom from wasn’t the tyrant they left behind in Crete, but the father whose ambition and corruption he could not escape by any other means.
Escape Rating B: This story, like the many Greek myth retellings that have become popular since the publication of Madeline Miller’s Circe, is a story we think we know. And we sorta/kinda do, as even in this version, it’s still all about Icarus flying too close to the sun.
But unlike the original myth, this story gets into the ‘why’ of the thing – even though it comes at that ‘why’ a bit ass-backwards and from out of deep left field – to utterly mix metaphors. Because this is about Icarus’ dear old dad Daedalus, and once we finally get to the center of his heart and he’s finally stuck revealing some of what’s behind all the smoke and mirrors he’s been hiding behind, it’s entirely possible that the escape that Icarus yearned for wasn’t from Minos and Crete – or not just from Minos and Crete – but was really from Daedalus. Who then chases Icarus across actual Hell just so he can hear that truth from his son’s own lips – as though the lengths that Icarus goes to – and that the gods go to on his behalf – aren’t enough of a clue.
That’s probably not the only interpretation, which may be the larger part of the point. Because it’s also the story of the tyrant King Minos, his battered ego and the way he papers over the tears in his own soul. It’s also, and, of course, about Minos’ Minotaur and the labyrinth that Minos had built – by Daedalus – to contain his monster. A containment that fails, in life and after it, at the hands of its builder, Daedalus.
Leading back to the idea that this really is Daedalus’ story after all – just not in the way that Daedalus believes it is.
In the end, as much as this resembles all those recent Greek mythic reinterpretations like Madeline Miller’s Circe and Jennifer Saint’s Ariadne, it reminds this reader a great deal of Nghi Vo’s The City in Glass, not for the story itself, but for the way that it takes familiar characters and/or archetypes and turns them in entirely new and sometimes strange directions to tell a story that is different from the one we thought we knew.
