A review by takumo_n
The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson

3.0

I'm totally not jealous that this is a very decent debut novel and made the author a millionaire, no sir! The book is about a guy with a horrible childhood filled with abuse of every kind, he becomes a porn actor in his young adulthood and while high and drunk gets into a car accident that burns him alive. In the hospital he meets Marianne Engel, a mental patient who tells him stories about herself 700 years ago, she being a baby found at the steps of a monastery in Germany and with incredible talent for leguages starts helping with translations of different parts of the Bible. Until in this story of the past she mets with our protagonist who is a mercenary carrying Dante's inferno which saves him from an arrow to his heart (very sutil), and Marianne does a personal translation to the German of the Inferno. While at the hospital she also tells him others stories of Japanese, Scandinavian, and Germanic folklore that bleed in with reality, even Dante's Inferno, all about lost love, death, and physical pain. It's pretty interesting. The problem is the main character not really behaving like an abused person getting out of drugs, or Marianne really conducting herself as a crazy person without her meds. So except for Marianne's tales, the main story is not that interesting. But it has a killer beginning and ending, and it is a debut after all, they all have the problem of not trusting their audience, because they don't have one. But it's good, I promise.