This was full of delights, so I'm glad I got around to it. It's a novel-in-verse, but to my fairly-untrained-eye not too heavy on formal poetic structures: no rhyming or fixed meter. Mostly it's structured as "long line/short line". The enjambment throughout made me really slow down; it allows the imagery to strike with more force than if it had been written as straight prose.
A re-telling of the myth of Geryon (a monster killed by Hercules), Autobiography of Red recasts the tale as a coming-of-age story. Geryon is still, perhaps, a monster—completely red, and bearing wings—but also just a boy, and the novel pushes playfully at our belief/disbelief in Geryon's physical monstrosity. Growing up on an unspecified island at some unspecified time (seemingly the latter part of the 20th century), Geryon falls in love with his Herakles, eventually running into him again in South America.
