Fiction Reviews
Tales of Heroes, Gods & Monsters
Babylon & Sumer – Myths & Legends(2026) edited by Fiona Collins & June Peters, Flame Tree Press,
£10.99 / Can$19.99 / US$14.99, hrdbk, 415pp, ISBN 978-1-835-62260-5
Gilgamesh, Tiamat, Enkidu, Marduk and Ishtar. Even if you haven't intentionally come across the Babylonian and Sumerian myths, as a genre reader you've probably picked up names and story fragments here and there.
Nevertheless, these stories are less well known than their counterparts in Greek or Egyptian legend. This non-academic collection by Fiona Collins and June Peters does them a service in bringing them to a wider audience in a more accessible, lightly modernised form.
Tales Of Heroes, Gods and Monstersis divided into ten sections covering different themes and topics from the Mesopotamian mythos. As you might expect, this includes creation stories, Marduk Vs. Tiamat, the Epic of Gilgamesh and the equally wide-screen adventures of Ishtar/Inanna. On their own these would make the book a worthwhile endeavour.
But Collins and Peters also find time for (sort of) love stories, erotica and tales of everyday people alongside the usual gods, kings and god-kings. There's even humour, in the form of fantastic disputes between ploughs and pickaxes, or the servant who agrees enthusiastically with his indecisive master through every flip-flop.
The authors do a grand job of mixing prose translations of the surviving originals with freer adaptations. As professional storytellers, they give these texts a vital connection to the oral tradition (which in a mostly illiterate society is how they would presumably have been shared) The resulting tone is somewhere between campfire saga and Old Testament, depending on the episode.
The Gilgamesh chapters are - if not the best - probably the best entry point into Tales of Heroes, Gods and Monsters, which need not I think be read from start to finish. A demigod, but no saint, his stories contain adventure, character development, male friendship, grief and loss. If he can reach through the millennia and grab your attention then the rest of the book may also reward your perseverance.
Alternatively, the Ishtar/Inanna texts are a good Plan B, offering a female protagonist and something of a corrective to the whiff of Babylonian testosterone clinging to Gilgamesh and Enkidu.
That said, any book where the reviewer feels obliged to suggest suitable places to start may not be one recommended to every reader. And so it goes with Tales of Heroes etc. - it's one you'll either dip into a hundred times or read once and be done with it.
Why? Despite the modernising touches it still contains stories that are thousands of years old, more distant in time and less well known, than the Greek or Norse legends. Generations of interpretation and re-interpretation have not equipped us to receive them in the same way.
Despite Collins' and Peters’ best efforts, this is not light reading, nor is it a simple segue from genre fiction into Mesopotamian myth.
Reading Tales of Heroes, Gods and Monsters takes work then in the same way that reading (say) the more neglected parts of The Bible takes work. There is magic here down here at the roots of civilisation but you have to dig to find it.
Treat this collection like an exhibit at a museum you can visit over and over again, discovering something new each time, and you'll be rewarded.
But if this is not for you, wait for the populist treatment of these legends that they deserve.
Tim Atkinson
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