The Star-Touched Queen

"This is a really fresh take, a whole different angle –it’s more of a homage than a direct retelling, taking the core elements of the myth. It’s about a girl called Maya. She is cursed, and she’s an outcast because of it. And then she overhears in a conversation that her father is going to give her away to a rebel leader in marriage, and she plans to escape, but her father says: ‘No, you do have to marry this strange guy. But also, we don’t want this going ahead, so actually you’ve got to un-alive yourself before the marriage.’ Then at her wedding she meets a new boy called Amar, and she picks him – she marries him instead. Unbeknownst to her, he’s the lord of an equivalent of the underworld, the king of the dead. So she becomes the queen of this kingdom. This is where it really deviates away from the myth: she goes off on her own story that doesn’t really connect to the myth at all. And then they come back together in the end, and she does become his queen. It’s interesting how this same story keeps getting retold in different ways. There is a powerful man that represents something dark and dangerous and a little sexy. Death is horrible and terrible, but there is something alluring about it to a lot of people, whether you can admit that or not. And I wonder if that’s a lot of the attraction of Hades – the being, as opposed to the place – the idea that you could seduce death, you could make death fall in love with you. That’s the element we see throughout a lot of these stories."