Loki: WICKED, VISCERAL, TRANSGRESSIVE: Norse gods as you've never seen them before

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It wasn’t until I left school and started coming across a richer world of ideas, when books like The Dice Man, Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse-F ive came shining through, that I began to think there might be a way of telling stories connected with life itself. I love mythology retellings, but this is my first Norse retelling; Loki is a character I’ve always been intrigued by (I blame Marvel for making him so loveable) and I really enjoyed the way in which he was portrayed in this. The author of more than 20 novels for teenagers and children, he won the Carnegie medal in 1996 for Junk, in which two 14-year-old runaways fall into heroin addiction; Malorie Blackman, introducing the book’s 20th anniversary edition, said it “opened my eyes to the possibilities when writing for young adults”. She’s also a great tutor, teaching at Bath Spa, the UK’s most prestigious course for Creative Writing.

I’ve made a career out of remembering being a teenager and trying to relate to that time, but it was bloody long ago! The dense core of the giant tree is hollowed out in a fraction of a second by the force of that tongue of fire.Take for example Thor's passion, dying nailed to a tree before descending to the Underworld and arising again, bearing the scars of his experience. If it’s true that wisdom is the ability to understand this ever-changing world, then the gods and goddesses are stupid. We heard his wailing, mother and I, and it was I who first parted the leaf mould and found him lying there. Loki was always my favourite god – I’m attracted to baddies – so in lockdown I decided to try and tell the myths from his point of view as a kind of experiment. Alongside the politics of Asgard, the novel charts the course of Loki’s many loves and families, from his mothering of Odin’s famous horse to his intense, turbulent, and, eventually fatal relationship with Baldr the Beautiful—a tender and moving story of a love that goes wrong.

Odin starts to go insane because he has peered into the multiverse, while the traditionally male god Baldr turns out to be a hermaphrodite, with Loki taking Baldr’s “second virginity” in soft-porn fashion on a bearskin rug. On the distant horizon, a mountain range towers above the sea of frosty trees, and among its remote peaks, a storm is brewing.The dissonance grows, the lightning spreads its forked arms and summons charged ions from the earth. Despite this, I must commend the author for their fantastic writing, making the book an enjoyable read overall. Twenty years since it was first published, JUNK was awarded the YA Book Prize special achievement award.

With the trickster, Loki, as your guide, journey to the ancient forests of Scandinavia and bear witness to the legends of Norse mythology. Readers are given a fresh look at Norse mythology through Loki’s eyes, starting with the stories chronicling the world’s creation.But there she discovers that her dad might still be alive, and has had his mind re-written by the Bloods in the ERAC, the Evangelical Rehabilitation Centre in Huntingdon, she has no choice but to go down south into Blood’s territory, in the very slight hope that she can rescue him. Books Meet Loki, Your Unreliable Narrator, in Melvin Burgess' New Mythology-Inspired Tale The acclaimed YA author's first adult novel explores Norse legends with the help of a certain notorious trickster. i suppose one must commend the attempt to shape the myths into something more inclusive and accepting but it simply felt unnatural, forced, and like the author was trying too ha