Book Review: The Gargoyle

Hidden deep within tales of disfigurement, gothic horror, and medieval lore lies a beautiful love story that spans over 700 years. “The Gargoyle,” a haunting debut novel by Andrew Davidson, explores the relationship between the caustic, unnamed narrator struggling with addiction and his saviour, a wild-haired schizophrenic sculptor named Marianne Engel.


The novel opens with a graphic description of our narrator, a successful pornographer out of control on drugs, as he swerves his car to avoid a hallucinatory onslaught of burning arrows and slams through a guardrail and over a cliff. The explosion that follows sets his body on fire with a “snap, crackle and pop” and he describes “the bubbling of my skin as the flames kissed it.” He wakes in an ICU burn unit disfigured beyond recognition with a “snake inhabiting each inch of my spine,” looking like the gargoyle from the book’s title


After being kept in a coma for seven weeks with “a machine clicking off the sluggish metronome of my heart,” he speaks of being “wrapped in my deadflesh body bag” after being sheeted with cadaver skin. His caustic humour provides a well needed break during the stomach-wrenching pages that describe the attempts to save his life. Doctors repeatedly cave away his “broiled flesh” through a series of painful medical procedures even using maggots to remove his charred flesh.


His recovery is painful beyond belief as his emotional recovery as our narrator realizes he has lost everything: his fortune, his skin and his career. “The irony was not lost upon me that after making all my money in the skin trade, I was now trading all my money for skin.” The only thing that keeps him going are his dreams of committing suicide on the day of his release.


But an odd visitor appears suddenly with “curls so alluring that they looked as if they would swallow your hand if you were lucky enough to run your fingers through them” that will propel the novel forward for the next 400 pages: Marianne Engel enters his room and insists that they were lovers in 14th century Germany.


This declaration sets the tone for the novel as we are plunged into two distinct love stories: that of our narrator and Marianne in the current day, and that of their previous life together 700 years ago.


As the narrator recovers and eventually leaves the hospital, Marianne reveals these stories as her relationship with the narrator strengthens. He takes a leap of faith and begins to believe these stories as they ease his pain and make him believe in a future for himself again. This is the main idea behind The Gargoyle: that the man who has been consumed by fire finally finds a woman to melt his heart and he begins to fall in love with her. “Being burned was the best thing that ever happened to me because it brought you. Only after my skin was burned away did I finally become able to feel” he reveals in a moment of self reflection.


Marianne remains mysterious throughout the novel and her sanity is often in question. She sleeps naked on stone slabs in the basement of her castle-like house as she prepares to carve gargoyles out of them, “the gargoyles inside tell me what I need to do to free them...It’s like I’m digging a survivor out from underneath the avalanche to time.” But it remains no coincidence that she remains devoted to this man so passionately and unconditionally as it is revealed through her stories: he remains the key to her release.


The stories Marianne tells take us from from Japanese feudal lords to fighting Vikings and are all woven around the story of their own romance back in the 1300’s when she was a nun at Engelthal Monastery and he was a highly-trained mercenary. These stories are filled with common themes vastly ranging from sweeping cliffs to delicious feasts to Dante’s Inferno. And, like Dante before him, our narrator will visit Hades in his final quest for love.


As an avid reader, I instantly fell in love with the characters in The Gargoyle. They are so fully developed that I found myself cheering for them in their low moments and even shedding tears for them as their stories are completed. The main characters are also generously supported by a varied cast that have constant appearances throughout the book.


Also apparent throughout the book is the evidence that Davidson has done considerable research on burn victims as he spare us no detail on the medical treatments our narrator receives or the physical therapy he goes through during his recovery. And the details in his fascinating stories of the past show extensive and as we learn at the end of the book in the Special Features section, were based on his own travels and seven years of research on such websites as vikinganswerlady.com.


I enjoyed every minute i spent reading this book. The imagery presented is breathtaking and Davidson has proven himself to be a heartfelt, skilled storyteller. He shifted seamlessly from past to present and presented these two stories perfectly as one. The fantasy found in such elements as gargoyles and mystic visions were presented alongside realistic details and medical terminology in perfect balance. To me The Gargoyle in uncategorizable as it stands alone as an epic novel that will cause you to get lost in its pages, immersed in the stories or these two star-crossed lovers. The only negative is that the story had to end.