The Rising Books in Order

The Rising is built on a clean, unsettling premise. The world as people knew it has already ended, and out of that ruin old stories begin growing back in new shapes. Murphy uses that idea to write dark fairy-tale retellings in a future that feels broken, flooded, and just strange enough that myth can take root again without anybody being surprised for long.

The books work more like linked visions than a single continuous quest. Them Shoes takes the shape of a Red Shoes story, set right at the edge of collapse, where a young woman finds a pair of discarded shoes and the old world starts slipping away around her. Keys reaches for Bluebeard, with a wealthy baron offering comfort and education in a ruined future where those things have become dangerously valuable.

The setting does a lot of quiet work here.

Murphy does not need pages of explanation to make The Rising feel real. A few sharp details, drowned cities, old systems gone, survival reorganized around scarcity, do the job. The result is a world where fairy tales no longer feel decorative. They feel inevitable. When the future is unstable enough, old patterns return because people keep making the same bargains, falling for the same temptations, and paying the same kinds of prices.

That makes the tone darker than her Border Kingdom books. These stories are less about enchantment brushing ordinary life and more about horror growing naturally out of desperation. The retellings do not wink at the reader. They trust the bones of the old tale, then push them through hunger, loss, class difference, and the brutal logic of survival.

At the same time, The Rising is not all doom. Murphy likes agency too much for that. Even in short form, her protagonists usually have to choose, resist, or understand something about the role they are being pushed into. That choice may not save them cleanly, but it gives the stories bite.

If you like retellings with a post-apocalyptic edge, The Rising is one of the more interesting corners of Murphy's work. It is compact, eerie, and concept-driven, but it still feels human. Familiar tales survive the end of the world here, only they come back wearing sharper teeth.