Getting swept up by Kurt Baumeister’s Twilight of the Gods is something like being picked up at the airport of the town you grew up in by a favorite sharply funny nephew with ADHD and a brand new driver’s license. If you agree to the tour, he’ll drive you through all the places that have changed since your time. As you weave through heavy traffic, darting along blocks you barely recognize, you fix on a remembered landmark for a moment only to find yourself disoriented again. Your guide chatters away, making sure you’re entertained as he disregards the rules of the road, pointing out some unrecognized structure while turning the vehicle in another direction.
Baumeister’s novel takes narrator Loki and a fair chunk of the rest of the Norse pantheon through a non-linear patchwork of human history, a path obscured by a flurry of loose ends left after the collapse of the Third Reich. Which of the gods were responsible for what part of that disaster is an ongoing point of contention between them. Bumping along for the ride in a barely attached sidecar is hapless meta-Baumeister, Kurt, who spends most of the book being mistreated by Loki’s hench-deities. The fraught present, brushed with necessary alternate history in the particulars, promises a soon-to-come ending based on the Ragnarök myth, but “not what you expect.”
For the most part, the settings are sketched in quickly and characters given no more detail than necessary, but there’s an occasional lovely scrap of description. Here, Loki watches his immortal love interest, one of the Norns, while musing on humans: “… Sunshine walks into the room, fresh out of the shower, a towel wrapped around her head like a turban. Bright, cornflower blue, it sets off her eyes perfectly, turns the dazzling into the otherworldly. And it strikes me funny the impact you have on us, the powerful impact you have; that a towel manufactured from cheap materials, in some veal pen, can change things even for us …”
Eons ago, I grew up in a household where an increasingly scratched and skip-prone dozen-disk vinyl Das Ring des Nibelungen was played in full several times a year, so the myth-structure of this book is familiar to me in all senses of the word. It was engraved in my developing brain as I hid from my father’s wall-shuddering bass-baritone bellowing out Wotan/Odin’s libretto part in well-practiced German. I can say with some authority that the world-build is done in far better faith here than it is in most modern treatments where the ancient narratives are twisted and chopped up until they serve as no more than a tortured top-dressing to some storyboard made to suit the market.
This Loki stays true to the source as he pops through layers of time and myth like a sewing needle pulling the fabric of the novel together. The gods in general remain faithful to their pedigrees. A contemporary understanding of narcissistic family dynamics on both an intimate and global scale informs the story without distorting it. Scapegoat and perhaps unreliable narrator Loki is the focus of grandiose All-Father Odin’s projected failings and the target of Golden Child Thor’s abuse. Baumeister poignantly conveys Loki’s wry despair as he falls repeatedly into Odin’s destructive manipulations despite knowing better:
He fixed his one good eye on me. Then the lid began to droop, and I was sure I saw a tear forming. More likely he was just trying to pull on my heartstrings. Or maybe my logic strings. He was pulling some sort of strings.
“The truth, Loki, is that as the head of a patriarchal polytheism, if I go down, I’m taking all of you with me …”
Odin leaned forward, cradled his face in his hands. “Oh, what’s the use?”
“Don’t get all emotional, Pops? I’ll help you out.”
He looked up, eyes dry as the Mojave, smiled for a second before shifting back to imperious. “Let’s get to work then.”
The work these characters do is the meat of the narrative, supposedly Fate-forbidden interventions in mortal affairs that careen from covert, solidly political maneuvering to manifesting the “deus” in the machina. Even to the gods, there are consequences invoked by crossing the Norns. A familiarity with the old roots of contemporary fascist thought’s poisoned tree is helpful but not necessary to appreciate the book. Whatever the case, leaving your sense of history and myth loosely anchored to the map in your mind, allow yourself to get spun around and enjoy the ride.
Twilight of the Gods, by Kurt Baumeister. Santa Fe, New Mexico: Stalking Horse Press, March 2025. 332 pages. $22.99, paper.
Queer, crippled, neurodivergent crone, Selene dePackh has spent most of her professional life as a trim carpenter and illustrator/designer (cover, Mitchell & Snyder’s Biopolitics of Disability, U. Mich. Press.) Her essays have appeared in Heavy Feather Review, Neuroqueer, and the Identities issue of Shooter. Slag Glass City has contracted for one of her longform illustrated pieces as part of their Archives series. Kirkus describes her 2018 debut novel Troubleshooting as “a gripping, lyrical, and ambitious dystopian novel,” whose main character is one of the “few protagonists in sci-fi—or literature in general—that present an autistic perspective with such specificity and pathos.” Her genre-fluid speculative fiction has recently appeared in the anthologies The Nightside Codex, Recognize Fascism, Nightscript, and Oculus Sinister. Her horror novella The Golden Road was published by JournalStone in 2022.
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