If you haven’t heard about the book The Gargoyle yet, you will. Lots of publishing industry folks think this book will be a blockbuster. Here in Asheville, we love gargoyles. There are gargoyles sprouting from the Jackson Building downtown, and glowering from the Biltmore House.
So I think I’m going to run out, buy the book, and check it out. From a recent USA Today story about the book and its Canadian author:
Could a debut novel about a drug-addicted porn star, burned to a crisp in a fiery car crash, be one of the year’s hottest books?
The Gargoyle by Canadian Andrew Davidson doesn’t hit stores until Aug. 5, but booksellers think it’s a winner.
“I can’t think of anything quite like it,” says Sheryl Cotleur of Book Passage in Corte Madera, Calif., who says the novel “has more depth” than other recent came-out-of-nowhere blockbusters like The Historian. “I think it’s The Da Vinci Code, but 10 times better.”
The Gargoyle’s story line focuses heavily on the unnamed protagonist’s medical treatments, but the novel also is a love story. The burn victim gains a reason to live thanks to hospital visits from an artist named Marianne Engel, who sculpts gargoyles. She tells the injured man she knew and loved him 700 years ago in medieval Germany. She may be crazy, but he can’t help but love her.
It took Davidson seven years to write the book, which is rich in historical detail and has numerous references to Dante’s Inferno.
Here’s the Amazon.com link. Here’s a snippet from the Publisher’s Weekly review:
Starred Review. At the start of Davidson’s powerful debut, the unnamed narrator, a coke-addled pornographer, drives his car off a mountain road in a part of the country that’s never specified. During his painful recovery from horrific burns suffered in the crash, the narrator plots to end his life after his release from the hospital. When a schizophrenic fellow patient, Marianne Engel, begins to visit him and describe her memories of their love affair in medieval Germany, the narrator is at first skeptical, but grows less so. Eventually, he abandons his elaborate suicide plan and envisions a life with Engel, a sculptress specializing in gargoyles. Davidson, in addition to making his flawed protagonist fully sympathetic, blends convincing historical detail with deeply felt emotion in both Engel’s recollections of her past life with the narrator and her moving accounts of tragic love. Once launched into this intense tale of unconventional romance, few readers will want to put it down. (Aug.)