"How Greek Myths Inspire Us to Be Heroes" Guest Post by Eva Pohler, Author of 'The Gatekeeper's Challenge'

Welcome to the virtual book tour for The Gatekeeper's Challenge, hosted by Reading Addiction Blog Tours! Today, author Eva Pohler is sharing with readers how Greek myths can inspire us to be heroes. Thank you for stopping by!

How Greek Myths Inspire Us to Be Heroes

I fell in love with Greek myths in the eighth grade, when I read Edith Hamilton’s Mythology. Later, after studying Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, I better understood why most people are drawn to myths: They help us to project and symbolically play out our own fears and desires. Carl Jung wrote of universal archetypes—such as the Madonna, the soldier, and the rogue. Sigmund Freud wrote that art was the opportunity for adults to continue childhood play in a socially acceptable way. Joseph Campbell built upon the works of both Jung and Freud to describe The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which inspired George Lukas in the creation of Star Wars.

As a writer, I, like Lukas, wished to tap into that universal consciousness where fears and desires are shared. Myths make it possible to project universal fears, or what we often call our inner demons, into monsters that can be externally fought and defeated. The most universal fear is death. I created a trilogy for young adults in which death is not only faced and, in some ways, battled, but also embraced and transcended.

In the first book of this contemporary fantasy, The Gatekeeper’s Sons, fifteen-year-old Therese Mills meets Thanatos, the god of death, while in a coma after witnessing her parents’ murder. She feels like the least powerful person on the planet and is ready to give up on life, but the story forces her to fight. As she hunts with the fierce and beautiful Furies to track down her parents’ murder and avenge their death, she falls in love with Thanatos and symbolically accepts her parents’ and her own mortality.

In the second book, The Gatekeeper’s Challenge, Therese has the opportunity to transcend death by accepting five seemingly impossible challenges issued by Hades. All five challenges represent the universal fears of rejection, culpability, disorientation, death, and loss in the forms of a box not allowed to be opened, an apple that shouldn’t be eaten, a labyrinth meant to confuse, a Hydra that wants to destroy, and the allure of bringing back the dead. These same myths are recycled again and again through the centuries because they help us to recognize our inner demons and inspire us to defeat them.

As I finish the trilogy with The Gatekeeper’s Daughter, which will be released on December 1, 2013, I’m holding a contest from January 1, 2013 to October 1, 2013 for my readers. Details can be found at my website at http://www.evapohler.com/contest.

Author Bio:

Eva Pohler teaches writing at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where she lives with her husband, three children, two dogs, two rats, and her very large collection of books.

Find Eva on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/EvaPohler

Find Eva at Goodreads at http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4888434.Eva_Pohler

Visit Eva’s Blog at http://www.bookclubpicks.blogspot.com

To purchase copies of Eva’s books, please visit her website at http://www.evapohler.com/books

You can also contact Eva at evapohler@sbcglobal.net

YA Fantasy

 

Title: The Gatekeepers Challenge (Gatekeepers Trilogy Book 2)

 

Author: Eva Pohler

 

Date Published: 11/29/12

Ten agonizing months have gone by since Therese faced off against her parents’ murderer at Mount Olympus, and she suspects Thanatos’s absence is meant to send her a message: go on with your life. In cahoots with her new friend, who's gotten in with the Demon Druggies at school, Therese takes a drug that simulates a near-death experience, planning to tell Than off so she can have closure and move on, but things go very, very wrong.

Than has been busy searching for a way to make her a god, and he’s found it, but it requires her to complete a set of impossible challenges designed by Hades, who hopes to see her fail.

 

Read an excerpt:

The Majorelle Garden in Marrakesh, Morocco bustled with tourists weaving up and down floral-lined stone paths and over bridges across ponds of lily pads and through antique stone buildings full of paintings. Cobalt blue fountains, railings, and trim unified the otherwise multi-colored flowers and foliage. Therese sifted through the crowd and found her way just outside the garden near the trails leading up the Atlas Mountains. A dozen tents and donkeys peppered the valley with the aromas of freshly cooked dinners wafting toward the sky. Picnic tables, scattered across the valley, held tourists eating the food these makeshift restaurants prepared beneath their tents. Therese’s belly rumbled at the delicious smells even though back in Durango, she’d just eaten a burger and was full. It was lunchtime back home; here, it was seven in the evening.

She wondered what these people thought of her wearing the silk robe, the golden scabbard at her waist, and the golden shield on her back, carrying a flute in one hand and a crown in the other. Maybe they thought she was an entertainer. It occurred to Therese that, indeed, she was, for Hades.

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