The old world had teeth.

Medusa was a temple priestess before she was a monster. She swept the floors, fed the owl, and asked nothing of anyone - until a god decided he wanted her, and a goddess decided to make her pay for it, and the face that caused all the trouble was remade into something no living thing could look at and survive. The Greeks took that face - the most terrible thing they could imagine - and carved it over their doors, on their shields, on the mouths of their bread ovens. They had learned something true and terrible: the thing that has been most horribly wronged becomes the thing that keeps evil out.

That is where this book begins, and it is only the first of thirty.

30 Nights with Greek Monsters retells thirty creatures of Greek myth, one for each night of a month, drawn entirely from the oldest sources we have - Homer and Hesiod, Ovid and Apollodorus, the tragedians and the geographers who tried, two thousand years ago, to write it all down before it was lost. The stories are ancient. The prose is new. Nothing has been invented except the silences the old poets left: the long evening in the temple before the god arrives, the inside of the labyrinth, the centuries a guardian spent at its post before any hero set out.

These are not the punchline monsters of the children's books. Many of them were not born monstrous - they were made so, usually by a god, usually unfairly - and these retellings do not look away from what that costs.

Inside you will meet:

• Medusa, the priestess punished for surviving what a god did to her
• The Minotaur, the child raised in the dark who became the use that was made of him
• The Sphinx, who asked her riddle not to kill, but to keep from being alone
• The Hydra, the first problem in our literature that grows worse the harder you fight it
• ...and twenty-six more, from Cerberus and the Sirens to Typhon, the monster who very nearly won

Each night has four parts, meant to be read slowly: The Night Before, a whispered approach to the creature; the story itself, self-contained, beginning to end; One Word, a single Greek word opened like a window - hubris, xenia, kleos, and others English needs a paragraph to circle; and On This Story, where the retelling came from and how the creature changed across the centuries.

Every creature is paired with a work of public-domain art - a Caravaggio, a Doré engraving, the black belly of an archaic vase - chosen because it had already, somewhere across two and a half thousand years, looked at the same monster.

Read one a night for a month, or read it straight through. Each night stands alone. Begin anywhere. Begin tonight.

Part of the 30 Nights series from Makoto Press.