The Underworld in A Touch of Ruin serves as a motif that helps develop the central premise of the book, a modern-day retelling of the ancient Greek myth, by offering a reimagined setting for the underworld to which Persephone is kidnapped by Hades. St. Clair keeps some of the same characteristics that prevail in the early myths but adds updates that afford her characters exploration and growth. Working against perceptions of the underworld as harsh or forbidding, St. Clair’s Underworld is also beautiful, creative, and fruitful, a place where souls live out a contented afterlife filled with friendship and festivals.

Much of the geography of St. Clair’s Underworld draws on ancient sources, including the Iliad and the Odyssey, the epic poems attributed to Homer. The River Styx continues to be the border by which souls pass from the mortal realm to the Underworld; Charon is traditionally the boatman who ferries souls across and requires a fee for safe passage. Tartarus is a deep abyss of punishment in which, in most versions, Zeus imprisoned the Titans, but it can also function as a place where mortals who offended the gods are tortured; one surmises that this is Pirithous’ fate in the novel.