Review: THE HADES CALCULUS by Maria Ying

Guest reviewed by Talia Bhatt, who can be found on Substack and Twitter, and whose debut romance novel Dulhaniyaa is out now.

There is an argument to be made that the true horror underlying Cronus’ devourment of his progeny is not in the viscerality of the act, but the inversion inherent to it. Children, after all, are destined to supplant their elders, to imbibe the best of their forerunners while rectifying their mistakes in a natural cycle of growth, of evolution. The atrocity Cronus commits is one of stagnation, hubristically believing that he can stymie this forward march, that he can break the cycle of succession and reign eternal. His demise, alongside his fellow Titans’, is a foundational lesson in the futility of railing against one’s obsolescence.

In The Hades Calculus, this lesson remains forefront in Demeter’s mind; it might, in fact, be her singular obsession, her animating drive. Most stories that retell the myth of Hades and Persephone tend to sideline Demeter, often in uncomfortable ways, despite the tale in many ways being about the grief of mothers with little say over their daughter’s destinies in harshly patriarchal cultures. Demeter’s anguish at having her daughter stolen away, her righteous fury at the agency denied to both her and her child, is frequently recast as envy or bitterness, highlighted as the impotent wailing of a haggard crone jealous of her maiden daughter’s fortunes. Somehow, even retellings that are dubbed ‘feminist’ merely for being from a woman’s perspective fail to center the agency of women as much as an ancient Greek tale, villainizing Demeter so that she may be humiliated by the men who claim her daughter as a prize.

Hades Calculus seems to wink and nod at this context, given how its opening carefully primes the reader to expect a similarly constructed version of the goddess of harvest. Her possessiveness over Persephone is both evident and unsettling, with her confining Persephone to the gilded edges of her estate. There is, however, much more to Demeter’s behavior and to the intricacies of her hidden machinations than meets the eye. While it is through Persephone that we experience much of the world and narrative, it is Demeter’s presence that hangs over it most prominently, like a shroud; even in moments of triumph, of Persephone seemingly clawing her freedom back with bloody nails, we cannot help but wonder if we are simply seeing another seed planted or another plan coming to fruition that ultimately tilts the calculus in the Mother of Wheat’s favor.

For that is inevitability that Hades Calculus grapples with most viscerally of all, the singular question that haunts every character and is likely to resonate with nearly every reader: can we escape our programming? The genre trappings of science fiction, its familiar devices of robotics and AI and algorithmic attunement are expertly repurposed into metaphors for abuse, parenting, and the outsize influence our progenitors hold over our very psyches. Echoes of the Titanomachy reverberate across every page, with every god’s characterization and behavior informed by the toll this rebellion against their creator exacted. Zeus’ fixation on opulence in defiance of her predecessors’ sterility, Hades’ fixation on being a memorial for the ones they’ve lost, and yes, even Demeter’s fixation on being in control, on lasting eternal when the Titans could not—all of it reflects how the war personally scarred them, and does a great deal to make every god distinct, memorable, and ironically humanized.

Persephone’s relationship with Demeter thus stands in harsh relief against Demeter’s relationship to the Titans, an approach that the Hades Calculus may well be unique in taking up. She is a cyborg, a killer, an incarnate weapon made flesh, her mother’s pride and joy. The book here makes the truly brilliant choice to cast Persephone’s struggles in a remarkably resonant light by depicting how Demeter views Persephone as an extension of herself, as a tool to be purposed to her own ends. Few of us could relate to awakening, fully-conscious, in a tank of synthetic amniotic fluid and having to fight for our very survival, but we can much more readily grapple with the existential agony of struggling to be more than what our creators wish us to be, to grow and evolve and exceed their vision of us. In that sense, Hades Calculus leaves many contemporary retellings in the dust by texturing the fraught relationship between Demeter and Persephone rather than filling it with androcentric cliches and a fixation on marriage and desirability. That Persephone’s ambitions are so directly tied to questions of agency, to whether she can be something other than what those who have historically penned her fate wish her to be, is a deliciously clever bit of subversion making this story all the meatier.

It is a gambit that enables Persephone to truly shine and take center stage, giving the readers much to sink their teeth into. Persephone fights in arenas both bloody and cerebral, buffeted as much by the turbulent politics of Elysium as she is by colossi and clones, fighting as viciously as she is able to carve out a place for herself in an endlessly hostile clime. She proves as hardy as she is savage and truly captivates the reader’s attention, placing her at the center of the tale in a way few stories even attempt to. Hades Calculus knows that Dread Persephone is a goddess of death whose existence even predates Hades’ and was the subject of a fair few mystery cults, a chthonic figure whose true name was spoken in whispers, and it more than gives the goddess her due.

All the same, the shadow that Demeter casts is long, even without a direct point-of-view chapter. We find ourselves asking, as Persephone does whether her victories are truly her own. We find ourselves wondering, as many who have been subject to the narcissism and abuse of parents, whether children can ever be free of their parents’ toxicity, or whether the poisons will forever lurk underneath the surface, germinating and burrowing deep within us, to inevitably sprout and prove that however much we may try, we all eventually become our makers.

That primal fear may well be the true horror at the core of Hades Calculus. While the book does not lack intimacy, it does remind the reader at every turn that it is first and foremost a body horror, a story whose most inflamed passages still drip ruddy. A primal, feral hunger runs through the entire ordeal, animating the pages with a verve that brings to mind Monique Wittig’s The Lesbian Body. The love between lesbians is ferocious, untamed, and much more than skin-deep, penetrating to the entrails, gripping with a madness that is only comprehensible to those who have wanted to devour as they are devoured. Hades Calculus is a truly lesbian book in text and theme, in every plot beat and minor motif, and is all the more brilliant for it.

In many ways, it is a transcendental experience, a work whose inspirations reach as far back a preclassical Greece and see as far in the future as some of our most moving transhumanist tales. Readers will find themselves gripped by Dionysian madness one moment and chafing against their own embodied limitations, as Motoko Kusanagi did, the next. Often, the way the book amalgamates these various sources seamlessly seems impossible; it stands nonetheless, a flawless alchemical achievement, a testament to the endless creativity—and possibility—of lesbian literature.

Do not ask if you need to read The Hades Calculus. Ask why you’re still reading this instead of ordering it.