The Gargoyle

By Don Ellis, martiniboys.com

Page 1 of 2

he book industry has been banking on a few selected million-dollar titles this summer - David Wroblewski's The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, Brunonia Barry's The Lace Reader and The Gargoyle, by Winnipeg English teacher Andrew Davidson – in the hopes one will be their breakthrough release.

The latter, a début from an unknown writer, has gained much pre-publication hype as early as last summer when literary agent, Eric Simonoff of Janklow and Nesbit Associates, turned down a $1 million preemptive offer for the manuscript. In the end, a deal did go through that garnered a figure close to $2 million, though international rights.

And now here it is. Davidson's unhinged debut novel has hit shelves with a print run of 125,000, and a serious marketing campaign splattered across on most major social networking sites.

So what's all the fuss about? The Gargoyle, as it turns out, is a wild page-turner about a car-accident victim in the burn ward that is visited by a mysterious woman who claims to be a stone carver in a fifteenth-century German abbey. <--quote#left-->

At the beginning of the densely packed story, our unnamed protagonist – a former porn star and now a porn producer, out of control on drugs - is driving his sports car, but is distracted by what appears to be a vision of flaming arrows. He runs his car off a mountain road to avoid them, causing a horrific car crash that results in him being severely burned.

Our acerbic, 35-year-old coke-addicted narrator loses everything in those fiery minutes: his looks, his fortune, his skin all burned away. A very ugly accident indeed, and we are not spared from the gruesome details.

From there, he is whisked off to the hospital, where an ongoing list of painful treatment procedures and assorted induced nightmares take over the story.

At this point, The Gargoyle somewhat aggravates, as Davidson's prose is a tad flamboyant. Our narrator, for example, has "collected enough blood transfusions to shame Keith Richards." And later, our narrator beckons us to place a hand on a hot stove to get a hint of what he has endured. But it's hard to put the thing down, as we're taken along for the ride to witness his burn case medical treatment, un-sugar coated.

The only thing that keeps him going is his plan to commit suicide when he leaves the hospital, ending his days as a tortured burn victim. But before this happens, a beautiful but mysterious sculptress of gargoyles by the name of Marianne Engel appears at his bedside, insisting that they had once been lovers in medieval Germany.

She explains that he has been burned before and gives him insight on many things, including the birth scar over his heart. She also knows the reasons behind his suffering. You see, in the 14th century she was a nun and scribe in the monastery of Engelthal who nursed him back to health.

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