The Gargoyle Hunters: A novel

by John Freeman Gill

NEW YORK PUTS YOU in your place. It’s bigger than you, and more important. It’s older than you, and newer, too. It’s more than you: more towering, more gutter-level; more striving, more complacent; more hurried, more arrived; more refined, more depraved; more timeless, more late for dinner reservations. It has a lot of moving parts, and countless immovable ones. And it doesn’t care if you have a relationship with it or not.

But disappearance isn’t the whole story, either, is it? Because however much we might mourn what the city is doing to itself, the damned place never fails to regenerate. It’s a snake that grows by swallowing its own tail. It’s a Möbius strip of self-annihilation and re-creation.