Adam Mansbach: Behind all of those myths, if you get into the history and anthropology of it, practically every Greek myth out there is a gloss and fictional spin on incredibly grisly and bloody rituals that were all about the ritual sacrifice of the king. There's infinite variations on it. Sometimes a surrogate was put into place so the king didn't have to die. There were fixed periods of time when the king would reign - a year, usually, tied to things like harvest and winter and summer, all of these markers. And he would be like, you know, ripped bodily apart in various ways, and this was the fundamental act and right of the various religions at the time. Now, the myths I'm dealing with in this book I'm largely making up, but I wanted it to be grounded in some of what is really out there in our history as human beings