Gods & Monsters (JJ King) Books in Order

Gods & Monsters is JJ King stepping away from pack politics and into Greek mythology, but she brings many of the same interests with her. The series takes figures readers already think they know and gives them room to be angry, wounded, messy, and surprisingly human, even when they are very much not human.

It starts with Medusa.

In Medusa, King reimagines the famous monster as Em, a woman still living with the curse that turned her into a story other people think they understand. According to the old myth, she should be long dead. She is not. Instead, she is carrying centuries of grief, rage, and bad history, and she gets dragged back into danger when her sister Eury needs help.

That setup turns the book into both a rescue story and a sharp look at who gets called a monster in the first place. Em has to deal with family, old pain, and Olympus itself, which means the scale is immediately bigger than one romance plot. The series treats myth as something personal. Every god has history. Every curse has aftermath.

Poseidon matters here, too.

His history with Em gives the series much of its emotional bite. She is forced to work with the god who once broke her heart, and that old wound sits right beside the larger conflict with Athena and the divine world that shaped her suffering. The appeal is not just the romance. It is the collision between personal betrayal and god-level politics.

Later, the series widens to bring in figures like Hecate and Morpheus, which adds even more darkness and magic to the mix. That is part of what makes these books fun. They are not trying to deliver a tidy classroom version of Greek mythology. They use familiar names and stories as raw material for something moodier, sexier, and more interested in second chances for women who were written off long ago.

The tone sits in urban fantasy with a strong paranormal-romance pull. Gods are active. Curses still have teeth. Old grudges survive for ages. Even when the world feels modern on the surface, the emotional logic is pure myth: love can start wars, punishment lasts too long, and one choice can echo for centuries.

King's usual themes still come through. The heroines have to reclaim power that was taken from them. Desire is complicated by danger. Survival often means learning how to carry a version of yourself the world fears. If you like myth retellings with bite, this is the branch of her catalog that leans hardest into gods, curses, and women refusing the role legend assigned them.