New York City. July 13, 1977. The night the lights went out.

Hel— goddess of the dead, ruler of Niflheim— has crossed nine realms to experience the one thing nine centuries of receiving the dead could never teach her: what it feels like to be alive. She arrives in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, with a denim jacket, a borrowed apartment, and a list. Burger. Subway. Live music, circled twice.

She doesn't expect Danny Malone.

A Vietnam veteran still fighting a war that ended years ago, Danny has been holding himself together on the stoop across the street with both hands and a beer he isn't drinking. When the great blackout swallows the city and they collide on the corner, something shifts— in him, in her, in the charged dark of a city that has just been handed permission to become something else.

What follows is twenty-six days. A crossword with one square always left blank. A basement jazz bar where a pianist named Celestine makes grief and joy the same room. A slow, stubborn, impossible falling in love between a woman made of endings and a man who had stopped believing in beginnings.

But Niflheim doesn't forget its queen. And the dead still need somewhere to go.

When Hel Came to Brooklyn is a literary romantasy about mortality and music, loneliness and tomato sauce, and the specific and devastating weight of having something to lose.