A Touch of Darkness is a retelling of the classical Greek myth of Hades and Persephone. Despite her novel’s modern setting, St. Clair fills her narrative world with legends, characters, places, and divine beings drawn from classical mythology. The ancient Greeks used myths to describe historical events, religious rituals, and even everyday occurrences. Myths were a way for the Greeks to contextualize and explain the world around them in the absence of the science and technology of more modern times. Surviving Greek stories of the origins of the universe and the gods date to around 700 B.C. The earliest recorded examples of Greek mythology stem from epic poems attributed to Homer, such as The Odyssey, that mesh heroic figures with divine intervention and mythical creatures. St. Clair’s novel recontextualizes many of these figures and gods. For example, Adonis is featured in Greek mythology as someone Aphrodite blessed with tremendous beauty at his birth; in the novel, he is depicted as an adult man who has a more physically intimate relationship with Aphrodite.

More specifically, the myth of Persephone and Hades is one of violence, which is much different than St.