{"id":4683,"date":"2009-10-29T06:00:34","date_gmt":"2009-10-29T12:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs2.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/?p=4683"},"modified":"2009-10-08T13:50:38","modified_gmt":"2009-10-08T19:50:38","slug":"the-gargoyle-by-andrew-davidson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/the-gargoyle-by-andrew-davidson\/","title":{"rendered":"Horror Week at DPL – The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here’s Tana’s<\/strong><\/span> <\/strong><\/span>gruesome entry for Horror Week at Davenport Library. Read it if you dare!<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\"gargoyle\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The Washington Post describes The Gargoyle<\/strong><\/em><\/a> “as engrossing as it is gruesome, the kind of horror you watch with one eye closed.”\u00a0 Truly, the opening scene is horrifying — we witness the unnamed narrator being burned alive.\u00a0\u00a0Perhaps even worse, we then\u00a0watch him endure seemingly endless and excruciating treatments for these burns, treatments\u00a0so painful that he\u00a0anxiously awaits his\u00a0 release from the hospital just so he can finally commit\u00a0suicide.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0It should be noted that the narrator is no angel — he’s a coke-addicted pornographer, a cynical character most\u00a0would consider\u00a0undeserving of redemption.\u00a0 Yet redemption he receives.\u00a0 It comes\u00a0in the form of visits from a beautiful sculptor, Marianne Engel, who specializes in sculpting gargoyles.\u00a0 The only problem is that Marianne is\u00a0a fellow patient, a schizophrenic\u00a0from the pysch ward.\u00a0\u00a0 She regales him with stories of their\u00a0love affair —\u00a0an affair that supposedly took place over 700 years ago in Germany,\u00a0when she was serving as a scribe in the\u00a0monastery of Engelthal\u00a0and he was a wounded mercenary.<\/p>\n

As Marianne continues to visit, she shares other tales of deathless love from other countries (Japan, Iceland, Italy) and she earns the trust of both the\u00a0patient and the hospital staff.\u00a0 It is into her care that he is released. Still, all is not well.\u00a0 Marianne begins a frenzy of work on\u00a0her final 27 sculptures and the\u00a0narrator\u00a0deepens his dependence on morphine.\u00a0 To break his addiction, he literally goes to Hell —\u00a0here the author leans heavily on allegories from\u00a0Dante’s Inferno<\/a>.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Fantastic fiction?\u00a0 Perhaps.\u00a0 Still, a definite page-turner — as long as you can keep one eye open.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here’s Tana’s gruesome entry for Horror Week at Davenport Library. Read it if you dare! The Washington Post describes The Gargoyle “as engrossing as it is gruesome, the kind of horror you watch with one eye closed.”\u00a0 Truly, the opening scene is horrifying — we witness the unnamed narrator being[Read more]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[874,253,863,866,867],"class_list":["post-4683","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","tag-gruesome","tag-halloween","tag-horror","tag-horror-week","tag-scary"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pd0CXx-1dx","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4683","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4683"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4683\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4735,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4683\/revisions\/4735"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4683"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4683"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4683"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}