There’s been a lot of novels lately that are putting different spins on classic stories. There’s Madeline Miller’s Circe, a retelling of The Odyssey from the perspective of the titular sorceress, while Jennifer Saint’s Ariadne, puts a new spin of the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur.
But in Michael J. DeLuca’s surrealist fantasy noir novel The Jaguar Mask (paperback, Kindle), he’s not so much putting a different spin on a Mayan myth as he is imagining what that mythical figure would be up to these days.
In the following email interview, DeLuca discusses where he got the idea for The Jaguar Mask, as well as what influenced how he told this story.