The Gargoyle

The Gargoyle's narrator is a highly modern cynic who lives in the moral void of current life. She is physically attractive and skilled in sexual relations. He is traveling down a dark road at the beginning of the novel when he is sidetracked by what seems to be a flight of arrows. A large portion of his body sustains terrible burns as he falls into a ravine. As he endures the torments of the damned while recovering in a burn ward, he looks forward to the day when he can leave the hospital and carry out his well-thought-out suicide since he is now both an outward and an inside monster.

At the foot of his bed, Marianne Engel, a beautiful and captivating, but obviously insane, gargoyle sculptor, arrives and claims that they were once infatuated in medieval Germany. She described him as a severely wounded mercenary who was tended to by a nun and scribe at the renowned Engelthal monastery. He finds himself brought back to life—and, at last, in love—as she tells their story in the style of Scheherazade and shares similarly enthralling tales of deathless love in Iceland, Italy, Japan, and England.

After being freed from captivity, he moves into Marianne's enormous stone home. All is not well, however. For starters, the stronger the pull of his prior transgressions, the more addicting the morphine he is administered. For another, God tells Marianne that she only has twenty-seven sculptures left to do, after which her earthly life would come to an end.