The premise of Fruit of the Dead – a modern reimagining of the Persephone and Demeter myth – intrigued me, but I was worried that Fruit of the Dead was going to be too abstract for me to parse, or perhaps too pretentious to enjoy. This novel is neither of those things, but honestly, I do not know what to think of Fruit of the Dead. It is not bad, but I do not think it is very good either. It is interesting, but I was not really invested in the characters.

For those who need a fresher on Greek mythology, Persephone is the daughter of Zeus and Demeter, the goddess of the harvest and agriculture. Hades, smitten by her beauty, kidnaps Persephone and takes her to the Underworld. Demeter scours the earth looking for her missing daughter, allowing crops to fail and humans to starve. Zeus finally intervenes and forces Hades to return Persephone to her mother, but before Persephone leaves the Underworld, she is tricked into eating some pomegranate seeds and is forced to return to the Underworld each year during what becomes known as winter when Demeter does not let anything grow while Persephone is away.

Fruit of the Dead is about an eighteen-year-old camp counsellor named Cory Ansel who, at the end of camp, takes a job as a nanny for the children of a billionaire pharmaceutical executive named Rolo Picazo, instead of returning home to her high-strung, overbearing mother, Emer. I do not find Cory to be a relatable character because of her casual drug use and poor life choices, but I could understand her sense of feeling adrift in the world, not knowing what she wants to do with her life. She makes the mistake, though, of thinking she has taken control of her own life by choosing to go with Rolo.

There are certain obvious elements that link Rolo to Hades: Cory gets to Rolo’s private island, located off the east coast of the US, by ferry; Cory is greeted on the island by Rolo’s three identical dogs (all clones of previous pets); Rolo feeds Cory his potent new painkiller Granadone – nicknamed “Fruit of the Dead” – which resembles pomegranate seeds. Cory becomes addicted to Granadone and spends the rest of the summer in a drug-induced haze, stumbling around Rolo’s island making as ass of herself and ignoring well-meaning advice from other people (such as Rolo’s ex-wife) to GTFO while she can, even though she is intrigued and repulsed by Rolo in equal measures and begins longing for her mother to find her.

I think Rolo believes that he cares about Cory, but at the end of the day, he’s just another powerful man taking advantage of a much younger woman with little life experience. He is not an interesting character as we all pretty much expect pharmaceutical execs to be evil assholes at this point. I wonder when we will start to see fascist billionaire tech entrepreneurs as the villains in novels.

I character that I really do not care much for is Emer. She is the head of an agricultural non-profit that has created a genetically engineered type of rice that is supposed to be disease resistant and able to grow anywhere, except that it does not grow. She loses contact with Cory while this crisis is unfolding at work, but instead of handling it rationally, she blows up her whole life on a desperate and deranged quest to find her adult daughter, and I say desperate and deranged because I do not believe she is truly motivated to find Cory because of love, I think her motivation stems from losing control over her daughter’s life.

Fruit of the Dead follows the Persephone/Demeter myth pretty closely, so I did not like how the novel ended. If this novel sounds at all interesting to you, I think you should still give it a try despite my ho-hum feelings about it. You might end up liking it more than I did.