With the disclaimer that I’m not into Homeric scholarship at all so this is just me pulling things out of thin air and overall vibes, but I love the idea of the Odyssey reimagined as a horror story. Something crawls out of the carnage of the Trojan War and drags itself home across a monster-infested Mediterranean, and past a certain point that thing is more revenant than living human. Again, this is more fanfiction than textual interpretation, so please refrain from being annoying in the notes.
Enough feminist retellings of Greek Classics, I want cosmic horror retellings that really lean into the idea that everyone is powerless against their fates and the gods. Everyone is already dead, Odysseus died a long time ago, but Athena won’t let him die, and Penelope weaves and undoes and weaves again and waits for the shambling corpse of her husband to make its way home and lie down next to hers, and perhaps what happened to Hector and Achilles was a mercy after all?
I love when characters are biologically alive, but narratively dead, when they passed the narrative event horizon a long time ago and now the only thing left is their metaphorical reanimated corpse being dragged through the remainder of the story, and I love when this is a deliberate literary device to hammer in the tragedy and horror of the event that marked the point of no return for their character arc.
What about if Penelope did magic---wove a spell with her tapestry to bring her husband back home dammit and every bit of unweaving and reweaving unwittingly reamplified the spell, so that by the time Odysseus dies the first time it simply doesn't take, his heart starts up again because he hasn't gone home yet, he thinks it's a momentary bit of dizziness and keeps doing what he was doing
By the fifth time he dies he realizes something unnatural is going on but thinks it's a blessing. He's favored by the gods, he's going home.
By the twentieth time, his body is failing under the strain. He dreams of a mortal spider-goddess weaving a web to bind him to life, and back on the other side of the sea Penelope is drifting into purposeful madness, sacrificing sleep, eyesight, posture, frantic and afraid as the suitors grow more insistent.
Soon it is not a story of devoted wife and determined husband, but a metaphysical tug-of-war between a frantic woman and a terrified walking corpse, and when Odysseus returns to Penelope neither of them are remotely human in any way but their appearance, and even that is hanging by the tenuous hold of "their audience is ancient Greek and does not have the understanding to identify them otherwise."
Odysseus is a cadaver, a skull wrapped in half-mummified skin, bones covered in ropelike muscle that has done too much, eyes burning with fever and terror and an overdose of adrenaline; Penelope hasn't slept more than an hour a night in years, her fingers are worn to the bone-tips and there is more blood clinging to the threads of the tapestry than there is in her veins; her eyes are as dead as a spider's now and her gait as unsteady as an old woman's; when she sits hunched over her loom she looks like a giant spider with her too-quick, too-sure hands each a set of clawed spider-legs.
When they come to each other and recognition hits them, it is not love but the crashing of a summoned magical tsunami upon the impossible strength of its summoner; they crash to the bed together and the loom shatters under the suddenly-released strain, and the blood-stained threads fly out and wrap the pair of them, and Odysseus crumbles into bone-dust as Penelope embraces him, and she knows his touch for a bare moment until the unraveling magic unravels her too.
What lies in the bed next morning when the maids come in is not human, and not alive. Two dismembered, flayed, fallen-apart, ancient corpses so intertwined one could not be told from the other rest there, surrounded by the shredded threads of a shroud, the very air ringing with magic and madness as vivid as clanging bells.
When the maids come back out with indecent haste and insist that the Master and Mistress are not to be disturbed, the excuse is accepted; days stretch into weeks and everyone who hears it remembers Odysseus as he walked in, who would have been known for a corpse if he had stopped moving for even an instant, remembers Penelope, whose beauty and charm had slipped so subtly over the years that nobody realized until that moment that she was as monstrous as he.
The house is let be; officials and newcomers, visitors and well-wishers are told, they are not to be disturbed, and something in the eyes of the teller make the decree hold firm against even the most curious investigators, even as an absurd amount of time passes, and then comes the day that all who have seen either of them the night of Odysseus' return have died, and someone comes seeking Odysseus, whom he once knew.
There is no one to tell him why Odysseus has spent thirty years in his nupital bower, and the idea that he has done so is obviously ridiculous, and the understanding falls apart like a spiderweb brushed aside; the people who live here follow just as curious as the visitor.
The crunch of bones underfoot brings recollection of a story---the slaughtered suitors---and it is with the dawning horror of people confronting a monster and the inexplicable insouciance of horror movie characters who don't understand that they're in a horror move alike that the people come to the bedroom and fling the door wide.
They look, and then they leave, and they bury the house in rubble and earth, and their children's children's children eventually shake loose the recollection that the hill was haunted by ghosts and build houses over it. Occasionally into the centuries, a sensitive child has recurring nightmares of a spider who caught a fly she loved, or a dead man getting up, again and again, and shambling towards home.
Under the hill, the wreckage of a man lies in the embrace of the wreckage of a woman, forever.
