RaveThe Kenyon ReviewUnlike Ovid, Mason seems less interested in merely recounting stories than in getting inside the heads of the mythological figures themselves. Hence, the chief power, mystery, and resonance of many of these tales comes from their first-person perspective ... We witness the transformation of Arachne into a spider, a familiar story which, in Mason’s hands, becomes something fresh and exciting ... The freshness of Mason’s fictions comes from the jubilant disregard they have for the nuts and bolts of the myths themselves ... Many of the stories in Metamorphica seem just as much a tribute to these twentieth-century storytellers as they do to Ovid ... while we will never sound the death knell of Ovid’s masterpiece, we do have, in Mason’s work, a bold new creature and a brilliant feat of literary imagination.
Alan Moore
PositiveThe MillionsI’m still thinking about this fascinating mess of a book and its countless allusions ... A cacophony of material that doesn’t always coalesce perfectly but that, fittingly, creates what one character describes as 'an apocalyptic narrative that speaks the language of the poor.' And the mad. And the sad. And the frustrated, the lonely, the lost.
