Rick Riordan cracked a problem no one fully solved before him: how do you make 3,000-year-old mythology urgent, funny, and terrifying at the same time? His answer was to treat the myths not as dusty curriculum but as living machinery -- Zeus actually runs Olympus from the 600th floor of the Empire State Building, Anubis works a coffee shop in New Orleans, and the Norse apocalypse is being planned in a Boston parking garage. The through-line his fans love is not just the gods or the monsters. It is a specific kind of protagonist: the kid who has always been told they are broken (dyslexic, ADHD, odd) discovering that being broken is exactly the design. Riordan writes outsiders who become heroes not by becoming normal but by becoming more themselves. Once you feel that, Percy Jackson and Carter Kane and Magnus Chase are not just characters. They are permission.
Essential Rick Riordan
The core library, in the order fans usually fall in
Percy on Screen
Every adaptation of the Camp Half-Blood world, ranked by faithfulness
The Disney+ Series Gets It Right Where the Films Got It Wrong
The 2023 Disney+ Percy Jackson series spent three years getting Riordan himself in the writers room, and it shows. Where the 2010 films aged Percy up, flattened Annabeth's intelligence, and skipped the Ares confrontation entirely, the series restores the emotional core: a scared twelve-year-old who loves his mother and is terrified of getting things wrong. Walker Scobell's Percy is uncertain in exactly the right ways. For Riordan fans who felt burned by the films, this is the vindication they waited over a decade for.
If You Love Riordan's Mythology: Films and Series with the Same DNA
Modern myths, ancient powers, young protagonists who did not ask for any of this
If You Love Riordan's Voice: Middle-Grade and YA Fantasy Authors
The same wisecracking narrators, hidden worlds, and earnest heroism
If You Love Riordan's Mythology: Games That Live in the Same Pantheon
Gods, monsters, and ancient worlds you can actually fight your way through
Hades Is the Rick Riordan Game That Rick Riordan Did Not Write
Supergiant's Hades takes the exact same creative premise as the Percy Jackson novels: the Greek underworld is a dysfunctional family business, and Zagreus is the kid who keeps escaping to figure out who he actually is. The gods bicker, the monsters have personalities, and the mythology is treated as character study rather than lore dump. Riordan fans who finish the Percy Jackson series and want to keep living in that sensibility will feel immediately at home here. The tone is different (darker, more adult) but the heart is the same.
The Rick Riordan Presents Imprint Is the Best Thing He Built After Percy
Starting in 2018, Riordan used his platform to launch an imprint (Rick Riordan Presents) that publishes mythology-based middle-grade fantasy by authors from the cultures whose myths they're using. Roshani Chokshi writing on Aru Shah and Indian mythology, Kwame Mbalia on Tristan Strong and West African folklore, Yoon Ha Lee on Korean myth. The books carry the same Camp Half-Blood energy but open up pantheons Western publishing had mostly ignored. If you loved Percy Jackson and want more, this shelf is the honest answer.
God of War (2018) Asks What Happens After the Hero Wins
Riordan's Percy Jackson ends when the hero saves Olympus. God of War (2018) opens long after Kratos destroyed it. The 2018 Sony Santa Monica game is a meditation on what mythology's most violent figure does when he has a son to raise and a world he has to stop destroying. It is Norse mythology treated with the same seriousness Riordan brings to Greek myth, but aimed at the adult the Percy Jackson reader eventually becomes. Fans who grew up with The Last Olympian will find this a natural, much heavier next step.
The Riordan Universe: A Reading Order
- 2005Percy Jackson arrives Lightning
- 2007The Olympians trilogy deepens The Titan's Curse
- 2009The five-book arc concludes
- 2010Hollywood takes a swing (not quite) Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief
- 2010The Heroes of Olympus begins
- 2010Egyptian mythology joins the canon The Red Pyramid
- 2016Norse mythology enters the world
- 2018Rick Riordan Presents launches Aru Shah And The End Of Time
- 2019Apollo's five-book arc closes The Tower
- 2023Disney+ gets it right Percy Jackson and the Olympians
Ancient myths, modern adventures
For Fans of Greek Mythology
Explore the For Fans of Greek Mythology guide →The thing about mythology is that it has always been about us. Riordan just reminded everyone that it still is.CrossBinge