needs more demons?

Talking to Addison is a romantic comedy about a handful of mostly underachieving single young Londoners, most of whom share a flat. “Addison” is the uncommunicative career nerd for whom narrator Holly Livingstone (figuratively) falls; a literal fall also figures in the plot. The general tone reminded me a bit of Lauren Henderson’s Sam Jones [...]

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Like many of the plots of Jonathan Carroll — the novelist whom The Gargoyle most calls to mind — the plot of David Addison’s novel might seem precious or even silly when reduced to 25-words-or-less form: Addiction-prone man, hideously burned in car crash, meets beautiful sculptress who claims to have known him in 14th century, [...]

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How to Ditch Your Fairy is a grass-is-greener fable that uses the device of magical entities to examine the unfairness of innate talents. The fairies of the title give the humans to whom they’re bound powers that drastically exaggerate normal traits. Physical attraction, for example, becomes compelling attention from literally everyone of the opposite sex [...]

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I appreciated the craft that went into Johnny One-Eye, but I didn’t enjoy it very much. It’s not the sort of book I usually read, but I picked it up hoping it might be something of a cross between HBO’s John Adams and Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor. It’s much more like the former than [...]

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