Can Lev Grossman do for King Arthur what he did for Harry Potter?

polygon.com:

As far as seminal fantasies go, you can’t get more fundamental than King Arthur. Told and retold across centuries and cultures, Arthurian folklore is arguably the wellspring from which we get the Western idea of fantasy literature. Its various keepers, embellishers, and recorders were the early genre lit scene, their audience perhaps a primordial form of Tumblr community. In other words, few stories in the English folk tradition have been remixed and commented on as much as the legend of King Arthur. So why is The Magicians’ Lev Grossman trying to come up with a new one?

To Grossman’s credit, his forthcoming novel The Bright Sword: A Novel of King Arthur is starting from a sideways place. The story begins with a bold young knight of little renown named Collum, off to Camelot to seek an audience with the Round Table and join their ranks. There’s only one problem: He’s too late. The story’s over. Arthur died two weeks ago, and the only knights left at the Round Table are the minor characters that only the most passionate fans of Arthurian folklore might recognize, like Sir Palomides, the Saracen Knight, or Sir Dagonet the fool.

Call it the millennial experience transposed onto Camelot; arriving in the big city full of hopes and dreams to find the economy is in freefall, all your heroes are dead or awful, and no one is coming to save you. Even with only one previous trilogy of adult fantasy under his belt, the premise is indelibly Lev Grossman.

Grossman is most famous as the author of the Magicians trilogy of novels, a mature take on young adult fantasy tropes exemplified by C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia or J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter. Beginning with 2009’s The Magicians, Grossman began his compelling and methodical deconstruction via what wasn’t in his fantasy yarn. In Grossman’s world, mastering magic was not easy, nor for kids, nor without terrible consequences. The Chosen One was painfully deluded, and the fantastic realms he journeyed to were not happy