With Alice struck quasi-dead, Phillips has an excuse to bring her narrative to the Underworld. This too is a place full of familiar mythological faces, even if more than one of them can belong to the same creature. (Cerberus, the hound of Hades, has three heads.) Think of action sequences and special effects as Neil, aided by his new friend Artemis and a host of other divinities, tracks Alice and tries to bring her home. Think of Peter Pan and Tinkerbell when it turns out that the Greek gods would have their powers back if people would just believe in them again.
Cliches aside, Phillips has bigger pitfalls to watch out for by this juncture. She has glancingly introduced Christianity into her book's pantheon, as Eros wonders wistfully why he didn't get to know Jesus better when he had the chance and thinks of how much more admirable the Virgin Mary was than Aphrodite, his own debauched mother. At moments like this, or when Alice casually encounters the dead who have perished in battle, the novel's sense of humor goes from fluffy to nonexistent, but it always manages to come back again. Gods Behaving Badly is much more fun than it has any right to be.
And although Phillips fulfills her purely lighthearted ambitions for this story, she provides a cautionary example to budding novelists everywhere. Though her background includes stints as an independent bookseller and BBC researcher, she also has a blog full of her thoughts about the hot competition on a television dance-contest show. When writers lived on Mount Olympus, they didn't talk about things like that.
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