In this enjoyable monograph F. sets out to examine the topos of the underworld in works by nine contemporary authors. A new volume in OUP's Classical Presences series, the book offers an appropriately worthy descent into the murky realm of Pluto to understand how this classical trope is used today, grouping the chosen texts into three porous themes: postmodernism, feminism and post-colonialism. Focusing on acts of either catabasis or evocatio, F.'s rich range of texts include children's literature, film adaptations and comic books, all from the 1960s onwards.

After a brief introduction that sets the descent narrative within literary history, the first section, ‘Source Texts’, offers descriptions of the individual sources that constitute an informal, constantly-shifting catabatic tradition. Homer's Odyssey 11 and Virgil's Aeneid 6 are naturally used to trace the motif in the epic genre, whilst the comedy of Aristophanes’ Frogs demonstrates how in Hades there has often been found the potential for adventure stories. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter and Ovid's Metamorphoses are given as general sources for the myth of Persephone (the latter also used with reference to Orpheus). From these various texts, F. then usefully outlines seven elements of the underworld narrative that ‘will often destabilise the very traditions that they evoke’ (p. 45): an extraordinary individual takes a journey; this often involves a descent or consultation; the said journey is often arduous; the space of Hades is vast; its inhabitants are often associated with the past; the visit changes the individual; and, finally, Hades is a literary space, ‘constructed from intertextual building blocks’ (p. 46).

Related to this final point, in the opening pages of this work F. describes the ‘literary footprints’ (p. 5) that each of the contemporary texts discussed must follow. These are apparently big shoes to fill, and the second section, ‘The Ghost of the Father: Spirits of the Postmodern’, examines the work of John Barth and Neil Gaiman in relation to how both authors engage respectively with James Joyce's and John Milton's own manipulations of the underworld topos. F. convincingly argues that, just as the underworld offers a bricolage of texts and traditions, these postmodern works blur the distinctions between high and low culture, thereby relocating the heroic paradigm in an alternative literary context. In ‘Engendering the Haunted Text’, the third section, works by A.S. Byatt and Elena Ferrante are put forward to question the traditionally-masculine nature of the descent. Just as Homer included an ‘Intermezzo’, a brief examination of Henry Selick's film adaptation of Gaiman's Coraline (2009) separates the analysis of Byatt and Ferrante to question rightly why girls (and not women) often descend into the underworld. Together, these texts move towards a re-placement of the Persephone myth within the context of female authorship. The finest section of the work, however, is the final chapter, ‘The Wanderer's Descent: the Underworlds of Diaspora’, which neatly utilises a combination of trauma and immigration theories alongside the consideration of works by Toni Morrison, Amy Bloom, Salman Rushdie and Ann Patchett. Cumulatively, F. uses these works to demonstrate the applicability of the underworld descent narrative to populations as ‘a paradigm for a related endeavour: the attempt to impose meaning on an otherwise chaotic situation by relating it to a story-tradition’ (pp. 149–50).

Whilst many of the readings of the texts are sound, one persistent issue occurs throughout. The monograph generally fails to distinguish between a direct claim of reference to one of the source texts and the overall creation of a chthonic environment. For example, in the analysis of the character of Circe in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, a figure with obvious Homeric parallels by virtue of her name alone, F. suggests that smoke from the cooking stove in the recent text recalls how a similar marker is used by Odysseus to find the sorceress' palace in the Odyssey (p. 158). Or, in her discussion of the prevalence of dolls in Ferrante's novels, F. suggests that the frequent loss of these pseudo-human objects and the consequent grief invites a comparison with the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. Certainly there are qualities in both of these features that can identify them within a scheme of reference connected to Hades, but given the underworld has long been acknowledged as a repository for various literature traditions, and F. even highlights the ‘archival quality’ of the space that allows it to act ‘as a repository for catabatic tales’ (p. 10), these moments of attribution serve to disrupt the monograph's accuracy. A result, perhaps, of the ‘Source Texts’ section, which acknowledges the cultural variety for the transmission of myth, but nonetheless attributes certain texts to them, these unconvincing suggestions of reception thus threaten to lead the reader down the wrong path to Hades, as it were. More information would also have been welcome about the individual authors and their connection with classical literature to more firmly preface these suggestions of reception: details about Ferrante's and Morrison's academic familiarity with Greek and Roman literature, for example, point in the direction, yet further details about this knowledge and awareness across all the authors would have been better still.

For F., as for many others, descending into Hades means to ‘enter the realm of story’ (p. 47). The book is one of a number of recent volumes that deal with this intensely literary space. G.A. Gazis's Homer and the Poetics of Hades (2018) and the essay collection A Quest for Remembrance: the Underworld in Classical and Modern Literature (2019), edited by M. Scherer and R. Falconer, are two examples of this revived interest. In her summative ‘Epilogue’ F. writes of how the ‘consistent association of the underworld with cultural production [implies] an infinite, timeless archive of tales waiting to be brought to life’ (p. 204). Just as Anchises showed Aeneas the shades of Rome's future, more chthonic volumes will no doubt follow in an attempt to define approaches to this vital location for the classical world throughout history.