Making the slow recovery of an immobilized burn victim into a page-turner is no small feat, but Andrew Davidson manages it in his bestselling first novel, The Gargoyle.

The book opens with a spectacular car accident: a cocaine-addicted porn star is speeding down a dark mountain road, taking occasional sips from a bottle of bourbon wedged between his knees. He careens off the slope, his car tumbles and it explodes. Suddenly, our unnamed narrator is a bourbon-soaked fireball.

If that sounds a little over-the-top, know that subtlety is not Davidson’s style. His writing is often hyperbolic and heavy-handed. While it does little to stimulate the literary palate, it does a good job of driving the book’s plot, which is innovative and interesting in its own right.

The narrator is an acerbic, emotionally stunted sex addict. Once physically beautiful, he is left severely scarred by his accident (Davidson doesn’t shy away from the gory details, right down to the “seared wick” of the poor guy’s penis). Disfigured in body and soul, our narrator — the human gargoyle — must undertake the long path to recovery.

His physical recovery in the burn ward is detailed and believable. Davidson manages to describe intricate procedures and use medical lingo without sounding like a med school textbook. The narrator’s spiritual recovery begins in earnest with the introduction of an alluring, possibly schizophrenic tattooed woman named Marianne Engel. She dotes on the bedridden narrator, believing they were once lovers in medieval Germany, even though he has never seen her before in this lifetime. She is a storyteller, and her stories expand the novel’s boundaries beyond a 21st century hospital bed. Davidson, who spent seven years writing and researching his novel, includes fairy tale-like narratives that span history and geography, all demonstrating the perseverance of love through adversity.

Indeed, love is the theme that permeates The Gargoyle — something that Davidson makes repeatedly clear in his unsubtle way (the cover reads “All things in a single book bound by love”). Marianne’s love is what begins to drive the narrator out of his gargoyle state. It is an appropriate role given that she’s a sculptress of gargoyles who seeks to “free” her statues from their stony enclosure. Is she really a 14th century nun who tended the narrator in his past life as a mercenary, or is she off her rocker? We walk the fine line between both possibilities, while Engel continues to spin her historic tales that give the novel much of its momentum.