Free Demigods and Monsters by Rick Riordan

Instead, grapevines sprouted from the ship, winding across the rigging and sails; ivy covered the masts; the oars turned into serpents; and red wine streamed across the decks. At this point the captain realized something was wrong. He ordered the helmsman to return to shore. But it was too late. Dionysus turned himself into a lion, and the terrified sailors leapt overboard—where all but the helmsman were changed into dolphins.
    You can’t read the stories of Dionysus without noticing a few distinct patterns. One is the way that ivy and grapevines tend to spring up, trapping those who have angered him. This is a device that Riordan uses in The Titan’s Curse , when Mr. D finally condescends to help Percy and his friends. But there are other mythic patterns, such as Dionysus’ fondness for turning himself and/or humans into wild beasts, which I think speaks to the fact that humans are animals. For all our civilization, we’re primates, and a certain primal savagery lingers beneath whatever morality and sophistication we acquire, a savagery that often surfaces in connection with intoxication. We do
our best to suppress this wildness and keep it in check—that’s why every civilization has laws—but it never entirely vanishes. It shows up in our crime rates and in our thirst for violent entertainment. Our species loves watching spectacles in which actors or animated characters routinely hurt and kill each other. The Ancient Greeks believed that such spectacles—for them, plays—purged these instincts. Watching the enactment of Dionysus’ story was supposed to be a catharsis , something that would cleanse the audience of its own violent urges.
    Another pattern in Dionysus’ myths is the use of mind-breaking illusions. Though the wine god is capable of creating earthquakes, thunder, and lightning—all of which he does in The Bacchae— his weapon of choice is to bend reality in the most horrific ways possible. A more minor pattern revolves around the god’s need for respect. In the myths Dionysus, the last god to join the Olympians and the only halfling among them, repeatedly insists that others recognize his divinity. This is something else that Riordan has picked up. Mr. D is always demanding proper respect from Percy, something that Percy is loath to give.
    Perhaps the most dramatic and disturbing pattern in the Dionysian myths is the one in which parents go mad and tear apart and eat their young. This particular kind of insanity seems to echo the awful events of Dionysus’ own childhood: being torn apart by the Titans and then all the madness that Hera caused. In a way, this is not so far from contemporary psychology that tells us that abusive childhoods can result in damaged adults. But it’s also a very clear-eyed vision of the power of drink at its worst, when intoxication becomes simply toxic. I know quite a few people who grew up with alcoholic parents, and though the kids weren’t literally torn apart, many of them went through a kind of emotional shredder, caught in the uncontrolled madness that alcoholism brings. When the influence of Dionysus is at its worst, people lose their sanity. Even the powerful natural instincts to love and protect one’s own children dissolve in the drink.

    By the time he gets to Camp Half-Blood, Percy has already had a close-up view of just how ugly and insane alcoholism can be. Smelly Gabe is a lousy human being and an abusive husband. Understandably, Percy, like those unfortunate mortals in the myths, wants nothing to do with Mr. D, and like those mortals, he underestimates him.
    Fortunately, when Percy meets Dionysus, the wine god is on a kind of divine probation, not allowed to indulge in his beloved wine and doing his best not to anger Zeus again. Mr. D is a Dionysus with restraints, a highly unusual condition for the god who was also known as Lysios, the loosener. Sardonic and unhelpful as he may be, this is a