Review: City of Dancing Gargoyles by Tara Campbell

 

I’ve loved Tara Campbell’s wonderfully strange and often sly short stories (for instance, the marvelously weird and delightful “A Turtle in Love, Singing”—read it if you haven’t!)  And so I jumped at the chance to read an advance copy of her forthcoming novel, City of Dancing Gargoyles, due out in September of this year. It’s every bit as delightful and weird as I hoped, a post-apocalyptic road trip through an American West ravaged by both climate change and secret “alchemical” testing.

 

Three storylines converge in this novel. In the first, two sentient gargoyles, E and M, flee their church in a drought-ridden land in search of a new home. A few chapters in, they meet up with another questing pair: Rose and Dolores, a mother and her teen daughter who are also fleeing—in their case, fleeing a series of cities ruined by alchemical disasters, including a disaster brought about by dragons. Dolores and Rose are also looking for a new home, a place of stability. The quartet are at first reluctant allies, who then become devoted friends. The final storyline is perhaps the heart of this strange book: in a parallel quest, Meena and Joseph are citizen scientists, researchers who have been dispatched on a road trip through magical, alchemically-altered cities to gather data on the alchemical experiments that have changed the world.

 

And what wondrous, bizarre, magical and disquieting cities these are! There are cities where wolves float, where magicians fall, where bonfires sing, and where robots fight each other with swords. Cities where bats binge on blood, and where statues from the sea bring either good fortune and abundance, or horror. There’s a city where books endlessly fret, and another city where books bleed. Cities of horror and cities of delight.

 

Many of these cities confront their visitors (and by extension, we readers) with uncomfortable questions about human nature—about our own natures. In the City of Glaring Chocolates, would you eat a delicious piece of seemingly sentient chocolate, even as it glared at you?* How far would you go for the amusement of making a blanket cringe in the City of Cringing Blankets? What terrible things would you do, whose screams would you ignore or even relish, in the City of Shrieking Ottomans? What would you put up with for safety—or the illusion of safety—in the City of Gun-Toting Trees?

 

E and M, Dolores and Rose, Meena and Joseph—all six characters traverse this landscape of haunted cities, alone and in pairs or groups, telling each other (or, in the case of Meena and Joseph, telling their supervisor via filed reports) stories of the cities the others haven’t yet seen. The characters are all sympathetic, particularly E and Dolores, who are particularly endearing and strike up a particularly warm friendship. Eventually, the storylines all converge in a most satisfying manner.

 

The City of Dancing Gargoyles is a weirdly wonderful and wonderfully weird book, a story of friendship and hope set in a ravaged world, a post-apocalyptic road trip through horrors and wonders. In its collection of magical cities, I was reminded of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. . . but this is Calvino with more horror, more bite. A deliriously strange travelogue, a quest, a wondrous road trip—this is a book to be savored in bites, one magical city at a time.

 

*The ending lines of the chapter set in The City of Glaring Chocolates are an absolute stunner—but not something I want to spoil here. Please read it for yourself.