The Rules and Regulations for Mediating Myths & Magic

About The Rules and Regulations for Mediating Myths & Magic

The Rules and Regulations for Mediating Myths & Magic is the debut novel by F.T. Lukens, published by Interlude Press in 2017. It introduces Bridger Whitt, a teenager who has taken a job with the distinctly eccentric Pavel Chudinov — and who discovers, once he starts working for him, that Pavel is not simply unusual. He is an intermediary: a person whose official function is to help mythological creatures, cryptids, and other supernatural beings navigate the modern human world without causing the kind of incident that would expose the entire hidden ecosystem of myth to public scrutiny.

For Bridger, this discovery means that the job he took is nothing like what it appeared to be — and that the world he thought he lived in is considerably more crowded and complicated than anyone told him. The novel follows his initiation into this hidden world and the challenges that come with it. The myth realm has been growing unstable, and Bridger's new responsibilities extend to helping Pavel address that instability before it becomes a crisis.

Urban Fantasy and the Hidden World

Lukens's debut draws on a long tradition of urban fantasy — the idea that the mythological and the mundane exist in parallel, with an unofficial system of management keeping them from colliding. What sets Lukens's take on this framework apart is the specificity of her bureaucratic imagination. The title is not ironic: the rules and regulations matter, the procedural dimension of the job is part of the fun, and Bridger's transition from "ordinary teenager" to "person responsible for keeping a pixie from trashing a Starbucks" is handled with genuine comic sensibility.

The novel also establishes the emotional tone of Lukens's fiction: warm, grounded in relationships, and concerned with the experience of being a teenager who has stumbled into responsibilities larger than expected. Bridger is funny and self-aware, and the hidden world he is navigating feels genuinely alive.

Why The Rules and Regulations for Mediating Myths & Magic Has Been Banned

The novel has been restricted in Katy Independent School District in Texas — the same district that has removed the sequel, Monster of the Week, and several other Lukens titles. The challenges to Lukens's work in Katy ISD and elsewhere consistently follow the same pattern: the presence of LGBTQ+ characters or relationships in a book is treated as a reason for removal.

Lukens's debut introduces a young protagonist in a world of magic and mythology, with queer characters as a natural part of its cast. The removal of this book from a school library is not a response to its content in any literary sense. It is a statement about visibility — about whether LGBTQ+ students in Katy ISD are allowed to see themselves as the protagonists of the stories in their school's collection.