Synopsis
An extraordinary debut novel of love that survives the fires of hell and transcends the boundaries of time The narrator of THE GARGOYLE is a very contemporary cynic, physically beautiful and sexually adept, who dwells in the moral vacuum that is modern life. As the book opens, he is driving along a dark road when he is distracted by what seems to be a flight of arrows. He crashes into a ravine and suffers horrible burns over much of his body. As he recovers in a burn ward, undergoing the tortures of the damned, he awaits the day when he can leave the hospital and commit carefully planned suicide--for he is now a monster in appearance as well as in soul.
A beautiful and compelling, but clearly unhinged, sculptress of gargoyles by the name of Marianne Engel appears at the foot of his bed and insists that they were once lovers in medieval Germany. In her telling, he was a badly injured mercenary and she was a nun and scribe in the famed monastery of Engelthal who nursed him...
The New York Times - Janet Maslin
[The Gargoyle] has been heavily influenced by some of Mr. Davidson's own favorite authors, who range from Vladimir Nabokov to Patrick Susskind to (go figure) the playful parodist Jasper Fforde. The free-range erudition of books like Possession and The Name of the Rose also come to mind. And the wearyingly popular literary story-within-a-story format is used here to incorporate a wild, seemingly random array of tricks and tangents. But Mr. Davidson binds them together with vigorous and impressive narrative skill.