Disney’s Hit Fantasy Series Officially Expands With a 4-Book Story Set Between Seasons

Rick Riordan is a very prolific author. He’s most famous for writing the Percy Jackson & the Olympians books, about a boy named Percy who discovers that he’s actually the son of the Greek god Poseidon. Disney is in the midst of adapting that book series as Percy Jackson and the Olympians, where Percy is played by Walker Scobell.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to this literary universe. Riordan has also written the Heroes of Olympus books, which follow up directly on the Percy Jackson & the Olympians books. While those series deal with Greek mythology, the Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard books grapples with Norse mythology. The Kane Chronicles dip into Egyptian myth. The Trials of Apollo follows the titular god after he’s cast out of Mount Olympus and tries to earn back his immortality.

Now, Riordan is back with another series: Camp Half-Blood, named after the camp where Percy meets other demigods. The Wild Zone, the first of four planned books in this series, is already on shelves. As it happens, Riordan was inspired to conceive of these new books thanks to something that happened on the set of the Disney+ show.

“It started as a very practical logistic conversation about sets and what we were going to do with them between season 1 and season 2,” Riordan told People about the Camp Half-Blood series. “Do we break them down? Do we leave them in place and cover them somehow and rent the land? There were all these questions about how to proceed that led me to think, are there stories that we could actually tell between that time of season 1 and season 2, between The Lightning Thief and The Sea of Monsters?”

From there, I developed a pitch that was both for a season of television and also for novels. My hope was to share the storytelling with four great creators on the publishing side, and then if the TV side happened, to use the same approach: to turn it over to other creators who were able to write about these characters’ backgrounds in a more authentic way than I could and see where the story led them.

For The Wild Zone, Riordan teamed up with author Annabelle Oh. The book is about Katie Kim, a daughter of Ares, the Greek god of war. Katie, who spends the off-season at Camp Half-Blood, struggles with the pressure of competing with her overachieving older sister. The story kicks off when another child of Ares, Clarisse La Rue, challenges several campers to run through the forbidden Wild Zone.

“It was a lot of parallels with me and my sister as well, because I have an older sister, and so it’s like Katie’s sister is kind of perfect…So I feel that personally because my sister is the same way,” Oh told People. The author also said she was thankful of the trust Riordan put in her for this project: “So there’s a lot of trust involved on his end and a lot of, ‘I really want to make you happy. I really want to do a good job’ on my end.”

Riordan is working with three other authors to create a quartet of Camp Half-Blood books, all of which tell the same story from different perspectives. Riordan will write the second book, The Rite of Aphrodite, with Kyle Lukoff. That one will tell the story from the point of view of Harper Rush, a son of Aphrodite. The third book, co-written with Jade Adia, revolves around Zuri Chapman, the daughter of Apollo. And the fourth book, co-written by Pablo Cartaya, concerns the unclaimed demigod Benny Garcia.

The Rite of Aphrodite is due out on March 30, 2027, with the other books to follow. It’s unclear if anyone will turn this new book series into a TV show, but the third season of Percy Jackson and the Olympians premieres on Disney+ on Friday, November 20