The Gargoyle By Andrew Davidson

If there's one book that I would recommend to anyone, it would be The Gargoyle. It's been a while since I get so deeply immersed in a book, I can't hardly put it down.

A debut novel by Andrew Davidson, this was first published in 2008. The book took 7 years to complete, and if you have read the book, you'll understand why it would take such a long time to produce this masterpiece. 

The book has 2 different timelines, the first timeline was from the narrator's point of view, an unnamed crash survivor who was deeply burned from the crash. Cynical and slightly sarcastic, with a career in porn and an addiction to drugs, his tragic life was both sad and funny at the same time. The opening chapters during the accident and the hospital stays was morbid, and it does makes you wonder more about burn victims, their suffering and mental health, and their long journey to recovery.

The second timeline came from Marianne Engel, a visitor that came to meet him at the burn ward. Apparently she's a talented sculptress of Gargoyles and grotesque with a suspected case of schizophrenia. She claimed to have known him since a few hundred years before, and question the scar that he was born with, the one over his heart. This confused him as there's no way she would ever knew about it. Well she then kept on visiting and this is when she starts to tell stories, hence the begining of the second timeline.

Marianne Engel stories are hauntingly beautiful, and tragically sad. She told him about her early life in the monastery named Engelthal and how she first met him. There was a lot of reference to Dante's Inferno, of travelling to hell and the Medieval church.

I have always been a fan of fantasy genre, so this is definitely right up my alley. However I do feel that it appeals to a wider range of readers as I can't quite place it specifically in the fantasy genre. A tragic love story that transcends the boundaries of time and the fires of hell, what's not to love ❣️