Twisted Abel

Forget the familiar royal quest to rescue a princess. The narrator is a prince who wants nothing to do with that role. He has watched what happened to his brother, who fell into a hole and now lives chained to a heavy weight, and he has chosen to work alone, leaving a trail of victims behind him. Restless and bored, he is jolted out of his routine when he meets a young woman with blue and green eyes whose singing reaches something inside him, and he begins to suspect he may have become the hero of her story.

He has never outgrown the fear of the monster in the closet. Years of keeping his eyes shut have not made it go away, and while he sits in his cage watching Abel take pleasure in others' suffering, he begins to question the myth of Hercules. What about the hydra? Did anyone consider its friends and family, or who stayed behind to comfort them? Did anyone ever speak with the creature first? Could one monster save him from another, and does even the villain of a story deserve love?

Written in a blunt, profane voice, the book mixes gore and dark humor with a fairy-tale frame, reimagining a Greek myth from the point of view of a character usually cast as the villain.