On Aug 6, 5:32 am, ++ spambot.com> wrote:

"The Gargoyle"
By Andrew Davidson

In the opening pages of The Gargoyle, Andrew Davidson's outrageous new
novel, a pornographer high on cocaine runs his car off a mountain
road. The vehicle bursts into flames and burns him to a crisp. Welcome
to the pain-riddled world of an acerbic, 35-year-old man who loses
everything in those fiery minutes: his career, his fortune, his skin
-- all broiled away. This is a story for people who like their
literary entertainment well done.

Following close behind David Wroblewski's The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
and Brunonia Barry's The Lace Reader, The Gargoyle is another in this
summer's extraordinary series of million-dollar debuts from unknown
writers that combine elements of mystery and mysticism.

Davidson is an English teacher from Canada whose bizarre manuscript
caught the attention of a big-shot agent in New York and then garnered
a $1.25 million advance from Doubleday and contracts from 26
publishers around the world. None of that guarantees a good novel, of
course, or even good sales, but this is undeniably a hot book, one
likely to ignite the passion of anyone who loves a mix of romance and
the macabre.

After that explosive opening scene, the narrator of The Gargoyle
awakens in an ICU burn unit, "looking like last week's dim sum." He's
been in a coma for seven weeks: "A heat shield kept my body warm
enough to survive," he tells us, "a ventilator did my breathing, and I
collected enough blood transfusions to shame Keith Richards." His
caustic humor provides brief moments of respite during the stomach-
wrenching pages that follow. To save his life, doctors repeatedly
carve away his "broiled flesh," make broad incisions to accommodate
swelling tissue and staple on new sheets of cadaver skin. "There I
lay," he says, "wearing dead people as an armor against death."

Davidson has obviously researched such burn cases in depth, and he
spares us nothing of this medical treatment, some of which he
reportedly learned about by corresponding with a burn survivor. I dare
you to read this without flinching. It's as engrossing as it is
gruesome, the kind of horror you watch with one eye closed.

As the patient regales us with his sad personal history -- abusive
foster parents, a lucrative career in porn, a string of meaningless
relationships -- his treatment progresses from one excruciating step
to the next. But there's no hope: "I could endure a thousand
surgeries," he realizes, "and I'd still be a blister of a human being.
There is no cure for what I am . . . a spent, struck match . . . an
unbeloved monster." Once startlingly handsome, now he looks forward
only to the day when he's well enough to crawl out of the hospital and
kill himself.

But into this pit of despair comes an odd visitor who propels the
novel along for the next 400 pages: A psychiatric patient named
Marianne enters his room and announces that they were lovers in 14th-
century Germany: "I've been waiting such a long time," she says. He
doesn't believe her for a moment, of course, even though she's
"dressed in a cloak that appeared to be of the finest medieval cut."
He assumes she's schizophrenic, but since her visits provide a break
from the agonizing skin grafts, he plays along.

That's good for him -- and us. Throughout the long story that follows,
Marianne remains a mysterious figure, her sanity constantly in
question even after we find her too interesting to care if she's
crazy. She's the world's greatest sculptor of gargoyles, or
"grotesques," as she sometimes calls them. She sleeps naked on slabs
in the basement of her castle-like house. "I absorb the dreams of the
stone," she tells him, "and 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 of time." It's no coincidence that she's
passionately, unconditionally devoted to this man encased in charred
flesh.

Best of all, she tells him fantastic old stories: edge-of-your-seat,
chivalric tales about lovers whose devotion transcended death. These
scenes are unabashedly, extravagantly romantic -- half scholarship,
half balderdash -- good enough to make him forget his pain, good
enough to make you forget yours! She's got warring Vikings and
Japanese feudal lords and, best of all, the dazzling adventures of
their own romance back in the 1300s when Marianne was a brilliant
translator in the Engelthal monastery and he was a brutal mercenary
struck by a flaming arrow (only a copy of Dante's Inferno over his
heart saved him). The thrilling installments of their first life
together leap from cliff to cliff, filling in the details of a passion
that nothing could extinguish. (For a break, she reads to him from her
own translation of the Inferno, a story she assumes he'll find "very
familiar.")

As the novel moves forward, the question of Marianne's psychosis -- or
is it deception? -- grows more pressing. She anticipates and pays for
everything he needs, but the narrator must decide whether to cling to
his skepticism or let his heart accept the persuasive power of her
dedication. For a bitterly cynical, drug-popping alcoholic, this is a
considerable leap of faith, but eventually that's the most important
action of The Gargoyle: the story of a man who, having been consumed
by fire, finally finds a woman to melt his heart. "Only after my skin
was burned away," he says in a rare moment of sappiness, "did I
finally become able to feel."

The Christian mythology gets a bit heavy toward the end, and The
Gargoyle is overcooked by at least 75 pages, but nothing is certain in
this swirling novel of tales and legends. The narrator has seen enough
horror movies to know that "a burn victim may 'get the girl' -- but
usually only with a pickax." After all, he admits, "Marianne Engel's
love for me seemed built on so flimsy a premise that I assumed it
would come apart." Nothing he