LGBT Book & Video Blog

"The Gargoyle" is also a much-anticipated first novel, featured before its publication in The Wall Street Journal, sold at auction to Doubleday for $1.25 million, with rights put up for bid in 26 other countries.

Writer Andrew Davidson hails from Manitoba, and noodled for years over the manuscript, corresponding with a burn victim via the Internet, looking up facts about monasteries and burn treatments and medieval German mysticism, reading a translation of Dante's "The Divine Comedy."

The result is as sloppy and extravagant as a toddler's kiss. Some readers, no doubt, will be in the mood.

The story opens with an amped-up description of the car wreck, whipsawing in tone from sadistic to playful, striking that bellicose note hit by "Fight Club." We learn that our narrator spilled bourbon in his lap just before his car crunched past the rails. The booze acted as an accelerant in the blaze, the driver's penis became a wick, and it burned away -- a plot point to which he returns us again and again.

One reason for that is that his appendage was a marquee feature in porn flicks, before our clever storyteller figured out the real money was in producing. Another reason is Marianne Engle, a patient from the psych ward who wanders into the burn unit on page 50 to declare that she and the narrator were once nun and mercenary in love in the 12th century.