Dangerous hills, winding roads, illegal drugs and excessive
amounts of alcohol are a lethal combination to a popular
film star and his fast car. It takes only a quick movement
of the steering wheel to careen into the valley below and
ignite into hot blue flames, changing a life forever. Being
a patient in a local hospital's burn unit is the least
likely place a famous person imagines they'll be,
especially since giving up seems easier than surviving.
Marianne Engel's passion is making beautiful sculptures for
a living, but it's her strong spiritual beliefs and
religious background that bring her to the room of the burn
unit. The relationship she builds with a patient there is
not an accident, but created by divine intervention and a
long-ago connection to the past. Together they journey
through time making memories and healing, but can they save
each other from who they once were to become more?
THE GARGOYLE is intelligent, innovative and dark -- and
really makes you think. I now have a refreshing new
perspective on literary work such as DANTE'S INFERNO. This
is a great read!
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 back to
health. As she spins their tale in Scheherazade fashion
and relates equally mesmerizing stories of deathless love
in Japan, Iceland, Italy, and England, he finds himself
drawn back to life—and, finally, in love. He is released
into Marianne's care and takes up residence in her huge
stone house. But all is not well. For one thing, the pull
of his past sins becomes ever more powerful as the
morphine he is prescribed becomes ever more addictive. For
another, Marianne receives word from God that she has only
twenty-seven sculptures left to complete—and her time on
earth will be finished.
Already an international
literary sensation, the Gargoyle is an
Inferno for our time. It will have you believing in
the impossible.
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