A love that defies time

Time travel isn't just for science fiction anymore. It's a surprising element in one of this summer's juiciest reads.

Andrew Davidson's The Gargoyle (Doubleday) reads like the mad spawn of Anne Rice and Stephen King, combining overripe prose and supernatural elements into a strangely irresistible mix.

The book opens with a car accident in which the narrator is burned so badly that he's turned into "a blister of a human being." Soon, his only friend, Marianne Engel, wanders into his hospital room from the psych ward to tell him they were lovers 700 years ago after meeting in the German monastery where she was a nun. Naturally, he falls in love with her.

The present-day romance is interspersed with tales about doomed couples through the ages. Marianne keeps trying to keep her love from killing himself out of despair at his lost beauty.

I tried to resist The Gargoyle's lunatic charm, yet I surrendered to sentences like this one, where the narrator describes a hospital picnic in which Marianne provides the oil and vinegar to feed him: "She danced a swirl of black across the surface of the yellow, and then dipped a chunk of the focaccia into the leoparded liquid."

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