In the opening pages, Davidson's narrator describes in unflinching detail the circumstances of the car accident that has left him, in a memorable phrase whose mix of dark humor and gruesome exactitude is typical of the novel, "looking like last week's dim sum." That this unusually handsome man, who has made a small fortune from a career in the porn business, both behind and in front of the camera, a man who has flitted from one meaningless sexual relationship to the next, should become a slab of melted flesh, an object of pity and revulsion, is an irony not lost on the narrator. Nor is the fact that, as if to add insult to injury, the fires that irreparably burned his skin also consumed his penis, leaving him with an intact libido but no means of exercising it ... even assuming a woman could get past his monstrous appearance. And finally, his small fortune has gone the way of his member, burned away to nothing.

Small wonder that this smoldering ruin of a man is sunk in bitterness and self-pity, eager only to get out of the ICU burn unit so that he can kill himself. But before he can put this plan into effect, a beautiful stranger enters his life—a psychiatric patient at the hospital. Marianne Engel is a world-renowned sculptor whose statues of gargoyles, carved out of stone, have made her wildly rich. She is also, or at any rate seems to be, a paranoid schizophrenic with religious delusions: you know, the type of woman who raves like a lunatic, looks like a model and has a body tattooed with snakes, a sacred heart and angel's wings.

Marianne claims that she is more than 700 years old—as, in some sense, is our narrator. The two of them were apparently lovers in 14th-century Germany, where she was a translator at the monastery of Engelthal and he was a badly burned mercenary shot by a crossbow bolt that failed to kill him only because of a copy of Dante's Inferno carried over his heart. Later, when our narrator, or rather his earlier incarnation, died, Marianne was blessed or cursed by God with an extended lifespan, one measured by the number of "hearts" she gives to the gargoyles she liberates from stone. "The gargoyles inside tell me what I need to do to free them," she says. Our narrator is just such a gargoyle, even though his is a prison of flesh, not stone. Marianne's mission—a mission from God—is to bring him back to life and to faith, while at the same time atoning for the sins of her own past.

What exactly happened in the past between our narrator and Marianne is revealed in drips and drabs through stories that Marianne tells the narrator. Some of these stories relate their supposed shared history, while others are more like fables, thematically interrelated tales of other star-crossed lovers set in Victorian England, medieval Japan and Dark Ages Italy. As these stories unfold, events in the present day bring Marianne close to what seems like another psychotic break and compel our narrator to make a choice between rationality and faith, fear and love.

Hallmark hidden behind a gothic facade

The Gargoyle begins remarkably, and it's intermittently gripping throughout. Davidson spares us none of the gory details of the narrator's physical plight, and the course of his treatment and rehabilitation is a riveting read, like a car wreck that makes your stomach churn yet which you're helpless to look away from. Davidson's portrait of a man whose keen intelligence and sharp wit have been turned into weapons against himself, and armor against the outside world, is a powerful one. So, too, is his portrayal of the process by which this scarred survivor dares to accept the possibility of love ... even from such a seemingly tainted source as the mad Marianne.

The Gargoyle is a strangely static novel. The pivotal events occur in flashbacks, dreams and visions. The nested stories are skillfully interwoven, but they entangle the present-day narrative so thoroughly as to nearly stop it in its tracks. The narrator can only wait for revelations beyond his ability to slow or hasten, and we readers are in a similarly passive role. The novel unfolds like a puzzle in which the author provides solutions at his own pace, leaving nothing for readers to figure out for themselves and nothing for characters to do but fill their assigned places. Still, it's an impressive puzzle, complete with acrostics for those so inclined.

But is it a fantasy? To me, it's more a Christian allegory, a kind of gothic passion play, a romance of sinner and soul, especially when the narrator pays a climactic visit to hell, which turns out to be the literary landscape of Dante's great allegorical poem. It's at this point especially that a peculiar imaginative failure overtakes the book, for Davidson's view of the Inferno and of the countervailing angelic realm proves to be a thoroughly mundane one, a bland recapitulation of clichés put in the service of one man's redemption. There, for once, Davidson's pyrotechnic descriptive gifts desert him, along with his undeniable flair for the grotesque, and the banal core of his tale stands revealed as a Hallmark card. "Only after my skin was burned away," the narrator writes in full-blown bathetic mode, "did I finally become able to feel."