The nameless narrator of this book, a very contemporary young man, is driving along a dark road when he is distracted by what appears to be a flight of arrows. He crashes into a ravine and suffers horrible burns all over his body. As he slowly in recovers in hospital, and facing the thought of living what remains of his life as a monster in appearance as well as in soul, a beautiful sculptress of gargoyles named Marianne Engel appears at the foot of his bed and insists they were once lovers- in medieval Germany. Over the course of his stay in hospital, she tells him stories of their past life, as well as stories of deathless love in four other countries. The narrator becomes addicted to morphine, which is depicted in the story as a snake which has coiled itself around the base of his neck.
This was an excellent read - one that's been on my list for a while. There are some very explicit scenes as the narrator describes his career as an actor in pornographic movies, and I sometimes wondered where all this was going, but it ended up being a voyage into his soul. The stories of their past, and the four related narrations were very well told, and my interest only waned a little when Marianne is creating gargoyles at a frenetic pace, because she knows when she completes the last one, her life will be over. During this time, he is rehabilitating himself from the morphine, so many of the characters in those four related stories show up in his drug dreams.
Davidson is Canadian, this is his first novel, and it took him seven years to write it!
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