Like The Once and Future King and Lord of the Rings, Tom Stone’s The Curse of the Minotaur is an action-packed tale written for young adults of all ages, from 11 to 80. Set in Bronze Age Greece some 250 years before the Trojan War, it tells of a world where fantastical monsters, good and evil sorceresses, and power-mad kings stalk the earth, and the old gods and goddesses appear to their worshipers in dreams and as animals. But it is also a world on the brink of momentous changes: a monstrous, sea-girded volcano is threatening to wipe out mankind, and heroes — mortals with superhuman powers and all-too-human weaknesses — are newly emerging to challenge the old balance between men and their rulers and gods. One of these, a teenage prince named Théseus, goes to the island of Crete to try and kill the Minotaur, a flesh-eating, bull-headed man that has been terrorizing his kingdom. There, the prince finds himself falling in love with the Beast’s half-sister, an enchanting Cretan princess named Ariádne. Meanwhile, the Minotaur awaits him in the spooky depths of the Labyrinth, less of a bloodthirsty monstrosity than a confused and abandoned child starved into savagery.

Stone has enriched his tale with the addition of a series of endnotes, images, and maps that place the story in its historical and mythological contexts and lend considerable depth to an already fascinating story.