The Gargoyle - Book Review

Though I encourage all of you to post reviews of the other books that you read, I know I'm not that great about doing it either. But, I finished reading The Gargoyle and I really wanted to share it with someone. Maybe I can convince someone to read it and talk with me about it.


Meet the narrator: porn producer, director, writer, and actor and continually on cocaine. He's driving home, the bottle of bourbon in his lap, and sees a volley of flaming arrows coming for him. In an attempt to evade the invasion, he drives off a cliff and burns. Well, more like broils. And lives.

The first several chapters of this book are on the edge of excruciating to read as he describes in detail what burns do to humans and how doctors treat burn victims (slicing off skin and meat, skin grafting, amputating, etc).

Meet Marianne: A patient to the psych ward, she comes to visit the lonely narrator claiming she has known him for 700 years. Is she schizophrenic? Manic depressive? Or in his imagination?

Meet the Gargoyles: Marianne claims to have many "hearts." She releases or loves the gargoyles from the stone and gives them a heart.

As his recovery continues, and he learns more about Marianne, he discovers that she is at least "real" but delusional. Perhaps she's schizophrenic after all. Claiming to be born in the 1300s, Marianne begins to tell our burn victim about her life in a monastary and how they met in medieval Germany when he was brought in - burned from an arrow but saved by a copy of Dante's Inferno in his coat - to the infirmary.

The story itself is interesting enough to keep me reading, but not exactly the page-turner that I was hoping for. What I loved about the novel were the 'fairy tales' that Marianne tells our extremely cynical, atheist burn victim to slowly make him realize love and sacrifice. The love and sacrifice that they both will eventually (or already) endured. These stories take place in 14th century Italy, Victorian England, medieval Japan, and Viking Scandinavia and result in one or both of the lovers dying in some way. In each story, the author incorporates classical Greek elements of the physical world: air, earth, fire, and water.

As I trotted through the book, it wasn't until I reached the story of Sei the glass-blower in medieval Japan that the book took hold of me. That short story in the novel really spoke to me - enough to make me think about it long after I read it.

Overall the book was really interesting... and the fact that I'm still thinking about it makes me realize that I like it more. It ranges from the raw, gritty, and explicit voice of the narrator to the baroque-like descriptions of 14th century Germany and Italy. There's adventure, mysticism, love, sacrifice, pain, and weird.

Click here to read the excerpt of The Glassblower's Daughter (the Japanese fairytale).

There's a lot to chew... I didn't even touch on Pergatory (literal and figurative) that is visited through the novel.

Hope everyone is doing well! See you soon!
Karina