In a world where Gods are a stated fact instead of just belief, gods and monsters have adapted to modern times in the mortal sphere. Anyone can find religion and benefit from it, whether to ensure one's hearth and home, to besting one's enemies, even bringing back the dead.
Teri and Phil get it into their heads to try and find a god of their own, maybe a small god who can help give their lives a leg-up. They search the internet and they happen upon one they might like: Luka, the Raccoon-Headed God of Good Fortune. They agree to letting him into their lives, though they're surprised when they realize that that means he'll be moving in with them. Not only do they have a luck god living with him, but it also means having to deal with all of his baggage. Being an immortal, he comes with a lot of baggage.
Divine Misfortune is the seventh novel written by A. Lee Martinez, a Comic Fantasy novel published in 2010.
In the 2013 anthology book Robots versus Slime Monsters, one of the stories — "My Dinner with Ares" — is set after the events of the novel, starring the Greek God of War Ares and the God of Death Ogbunabali.
Divine Misfortune contains the following tropes:
- Bad Boss: Being a God of Evil, Gorgoz likes to make his followers commit terrible deeds or self-harm whenever they fail him or for his own amusement. That is if he doesn't just kill and eat them first. Being one of his cultists also means that after death, your soul turns into one of his animal familiars to serve him for all eternity, so the cons outweigh the pros by a wide margin.
- Bargain with Heaven: Blessings and miracles don't come cheap after all. With modernization kicking in and the Court of Divine Affairs corralling all of the gods of the Earth, people can willingly choose what god they can worship, with the terms of one's religious affiliation laid out beforehand. It also gives the gods the right to smite their followers if they violate that pact, though the "smiting" can be anything from death, getting Dragged Off to Hell or just giving them a really shitty day.
- Celestial Bureaucracy: While it's implied that The Time of Myths was a free-for-all, the Court of Divine Affairs was established to keep the gods from destroying the world out of vindictiveness, vengeance or sheer boredom. They also help enforce the rights of their mortal followers to a minimum (albeit while still being lower than gods in the cosmic hierarchy) and dually punish gods who threaten the world.
- Central Theme: Powering through all the bad stuff and getting on with one's life i.e. "getting over it."
- Deus ex Machina: Lucky manages to save Phil and Teri by getting every god in the Court of Divine Affairs to show up and smiting him for them. They even lampshade that it's a Deus Ex Machina, something that Lucky, being a God of Good Fortune, falls into his wheelhouse.
- Disproportionate Retribution: Syph runs on this with nearly everything she does. When Lucky breaks up with her, she transforms from a Love Goddess to a Goddess of Heartbreak and spends a millenia being a Drama Queen that makes everyone around her miserable. She threatens to kill Janet for dating her ex-boyfriend, said ex-boyfriend's power being the only thing protecting her. When she sees a woman trying to get into her ex-boyfriend's house, wanting her DVD player back, Syph nearly has him Dragged Off to Hell over it.
- Driven to Suicide: This tends to happen to a lot of Syph's "followers". One past "follower" literally died when his heart gave out, dying from a lack of will to live.
- Evil Is Petty: Gorgoz had vowed to destroy Lucky and everything he holds dear, a vow he's been obsessively working to fulfill. Why? Because he stole his girlfriend. He doesn't even remember what her name was, nor does he actually seem all that wounded over it. He's just going to all the trouble because he takes pleasure in inconveniencing a nemesis.
- God of Chaos: Gorgoz identifies as a God of Chaos and Death, but less in the "Primordial Chaos predating order" kind and more like "Chaos Is Evil, therefor he's a God of Evil" way.
- Gods Need Prayer Badly: While gods are powerful by default, they can gain strength through acts of prayer and sacrifices done for them. The exact parameters are a little vague, but these can be anything from leaving food by an alter and pouring their favorite drink down the drain, to lifelong vows, blood offerings and human sacrifice.
- Godzilla Threshold: Pretty much every god at the Court of Divine Affairs show up to smite Gorgoz (or the closest thing to smiting a god can experience), everyone in agreement that Gorgoz is that much of a threat to the world. Keep in mind that getting two gods to agree on something is highly improbable, let alone all of them.
- Good Fortune from God: Luka, or "Lucky" as he prefers, is a Raccoon God of Good Fortune, and is the one who Teri and Phil make a pact with.
- Human Sacrifice: Human sacrifice used to be a common practice before it was made illegal. Doesn't stop cults and more unsavory Gods from partaking in it.
- Hypocrite: Syph, who has spent the last thousand years defining herself by her messy break-up with Lucky, mocks Gorgoz for his vendetta against Lucky for stealing his girlfriend without a single shred of irony.
- Ignored Epiphany: While Syph manages to make a stable life for herself with a mix of Gorgoz's incarceration and accumulating willing followers, Syph is still obsessed with Lucky and will continue to stalk him for the foreseeable future.
- It's All About Me: While Syph claims that her becoming the Goddess of Heartbreak and Tragedy was an unfortunate series of circumstances that had befallen her through no fault of her own, it becomes more and more obvious that she's a selfish and petty Drama Queen even by godly standards. She went from being a Love Goddess to what she is now when her boyfriend (Lucky) broke-up with her, attaches herself to individuals without their consent and sucks the life out of them like a parasite with her perpetual aura of sadness, schemes to smite any lover Lucky takes until he "comes to his senses", ignores what's basically a restraining order he filed against her, and then takes it personally when her other ex (Gorgoz) wasn't waging his eternal grudge against Lucky because she left him for Lucky.
- Love Goddess: Syph started out as the Goddess of Love (her pantheon is never specified). Then after she fell in love with Lucky only for him to dump her, it changes her so fundamentally that she turns into a Goddess associated with Heartbreak and Tragedy. She spends literally a millenia wandering around as a depressed vagrant before eventually being inspired to use her godly powers to avenge scorned lovers.
- Modernized God: With times changing, a lot of gods have modernized their domain, brand and methods.
- Hephaestus, Greek God of the Forge, has his own motor company — Hephaestus Motors — employed with people cast from metal.
- While Fólkvangr was originally reserved for the Aesir and the Einherjar, modernization had led to Odin opening it up to living mortals and other gods who pay for tickets, turning their annual battles into a Blood Sport.
- Nay-Theist: Being a world where the existence of gods and the supernatural are a proven fact instead of speculation, being a part of a religion and serving a god has become a bureaucratic and transactional affair and one can choose to take part or abstain. Teri in particular wanted to abstain from such practices after her grandfather was smote, but decides to give it a try at the thought of using divine power for good. Her friend Janet is a "deiphile", meaning that while she is unwilling to commit to a faith, she's a big fan of gods and even starts dating Lucky.
- Obstructive Bureaucrat: While the Court of Divine Affairs was founded to make things fair between gods and mortals, actually relying on them when things go pear-shaped — like Syph making her "followers" miserable, or Phil and Teri having to deal with Lucky's enemies showing up and making their lives difficult — is an exercise in futility considering how long it takes to get one's case sorted out.
- Power Incontinence: Luka reveals that Gods don't so much control their domains as much as they influence them unconsciously. In his case, being a God of Good Fortune, being around him long enough can amplify one's good luck. Should he leave, he takes all of your good luck with him, giving Teri and Phil catastrophic bad luck when they try asking him to leave.
- Punch-Clock Villain: The Great Serpent Jörmungandr from Norse Mythology is briefly woken up when all the collective gods from the Court of Divine Affairs nuke Gorgoz, only to fall back asleep when he sees that Götterdämmerung isn't set to go off for at least 2,000 years.
- Screw Destiny: According to Lucky, the concept of fate and destiny went out the window as the human population became bigger and bigger, hence why great heroes and prophets went out of fashion.
- The Thing That Would Not Leave: Syph attaches herself to whoever "lets her into their lives". In Bonnie's case, it was just sharing a park bench. From then on Syph follows her home and refuses to leave. Since she's the Goddess of Heartbreak, this causes her food to go bad, her surroundings having a permanent chill, all media becomes warped into depressing parodies of themselves and Bonnie has to suffer from a constant feeling of existential ennui.
- You Didn't Ask: It isn't until they agree to let Lucky into their lives do Phil and Teri find out that he has a Stalker with a Crush (his ex-girlfriend, the Goddess of Heartbreak) and a God of Chaos and Evil who has vowed to torture and kill everyone who ever makes contact with, especially his followers. He insists that they don't have to worry about it and that he has it handled, but that doesn't necessarily make it all better.
