The Return of the Titan and Serpent Story Cycle
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If you’ve been browsing the site, you may have noticed that we’ve revealed the second series initially teased on our Books page. You may also have noticed that there’s three new stories (free) to read from Huldra House this week.
Those three stories — And at its Heart, Such Depths; And in That Sheltered Sea, a Colossus; and Until There is Only Hunger — are all previously published parts of the Titan and Serpent cycle. You can grab your free reprint copies from here.
All three of those stories came out between 2016-2018. And though those were the only ones published, those stories were just the beginning of a larger project. One I’d been working on since attending Clarion West in 2014 (And at its Heart, Such Depths was my week five story) and heavily influenced by Shadow of the Colossus, and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, and heavily focused on and around identity, transformation, rebirth, and reclamation.
(Shocking coming from me, I know…)
Back in spring of 2020, I got a Canada Council for the Arts grant for a novel project — I’d applied wanting to turn the Titan and Serpent cycle into a fix-up novel using stories already written and a number of planned ones. And the CCA thought the project worthwhile, for which I was immensely grateful.
The thing is though, those stories are Weird Fiction first and foremost, and the worldbuilding of that cycle is so much background and intentionally only partially defined that in trying to foreground it the novel kept breaking on the shores of build literalized, grounded myth. Except the larger narrative of Titan and Serpent is an overarching romance (and other romance arcs along the way), and how we interact with a world where magic floods into the world after its end. The story is about the characters first and foremost, and I made myself absolutely miserable trying to contort this cycle into the shape of a novel.
I spent a good few years trying to make it work as one anyway, because publishing expects us to “graduate” into working on novels as writers, and I’d had the grant and didn’t that prove that this was the right way to tell that story if other people agreed with my initial assessment that it might be? So I rewrote it multiple ways. And the book always resisted.
Because the truth is, the Titan and Serpent stories have always been ... stories. They follow the same character (most of the time), but, to borrow text from the series’ introductory section on the site here, it’s: a 1,250 year queer eco-fiction odyssey told in linked stories — a narrative of identity, transformation, personal and cultural memory, how we embody our cities and they us, and the cycle of societal collapse and rebuilding.
And in the end, I was trying to fit something sprawling into a shape it was never meant to hold.
So, in 2026, I'm bringing the Titan and Serpent cycle home in the form it feels like it was always meant to be: as a collection pulling together the three pieces published originally in Augur, Shimmer, and the anthology Upside Down: Inverted Tropes in Storytelling, and several of the uncollected parts of it, and some of the components written originally for the novel version.
Not all the parts of the story that were in the novel are in this coming collection. And there are other ones I want to write in this universe, but I haven’t figured out the shape of those yet. And I’m not sure those particular stories are right for this, the central collection covering the arc of the Stranger, who collects names and roles like more mundane travellers collect passport stamps. But the stories in this coming book are her central arc, and though she may take many roles — forever seeking to understand who and what she is — she is always nothing if not herself: a woman who was once a mountain, possessed of two souls, an eater of spirits and ghosts who carries within her the bones and spirits of the city that was once Toronto, wandering a post-apocalyptic world rewilding and rebuilding over centuries.
We’ll be fundraising for some costs toward producing the Titan and Serpent collection in October, and the collection itself will be out in Fall 2026. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy spending time with the Stranger and her world as much as I have — and, again, you can follow some of the earliest parts of her journey (for free) here.