Why are we drawn into stories about adventures? Why the fascination with journeys traveled by characters like Harry Potter or Katniss Everdeen (in the Hunger Games books) or Elizabeth in The Crown or the fabulously named Chiron in Moonlight?
Joseph Campbell would tell us that these are all hero journeys, following the schema that he laid out in his ground-breaking book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. His claim was that this story structure is all but literally hard-wired into the human brain — that we tell stories this way because stories that follow this pattern — or acknowledge the pattern before breaking it — release transformative psychological power. Enter Earth Guardians book two: Stag Rider.
