Great coffee table book of pictures of gargoyles and other building ornamentation. It has a 30+ page introduction by Stephen King where tries to set the tone for the book with his rambling sense of style. The most interesting thing from his introduction is noted that nearly all the gargoyles look downwards. They see us but we don't see them, meaning that we don't look up. That being said full of wonderful photos. Most of the gargoyles seem to be in keystone arches but there are a number of true drain spout gargoyles and other just whimsical follies included as well. Nice to just flip through and look at the pictures. At the end there are actually names/locations listed for the buildings that said pictures came from. ( )

"We don't see them," he said, "but they see us."

Creepy, but true! I picked this up because of Stephen King, but his essay isn't much of a read. Although, I did learn that some gargoyles are used as part of the drainage system for buildings, so that's kind of neat! The pictures are cool, creepy at times, and it was fun to flip through the pages. In fact, I was doing so at a coffee shop, and a homeless guy sat down next to me to look at them too! He told me he felt like gargoyles were made to protect the home or building by scaring off would be evil doers. I felt like I made a friend, even if it was for only a 100 pages or so.
If you like gargoyles, or starting conversations with the homeless, this is your book! ( )

An illustrated book with pictures of gargoyles carved in the buildings of New York. ( )

So I saw this at my local library and decided to pick up a company. Serendipity abounds, because it's even neater than I thought.

I fully expected a panoply of awesome and varied gargoyles. A quick flip through confirms that goal is achieved. So I flip to the introduction, and find Stephen King pontificating on gargoyles. And Gargoyles.

I love Stephen King, and I particularly love his nonfiction, like Danse Macabre and On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. His prose always reads like he's sitting with the reader on a porch, leaning forward, eyes alight, beer in hand. He muses on gargoyles, why they unnerve us, and he and his son's love of the 1972 made for TV movie.

He's got good taste. It's one of the few VHS tapes I've kept, but it's on Dailymotion.

If that isn't enough, there's a location appendix! You can locate every gargoyle pictured inside. That's a walking tour I want to take, next time I'm in Manhattan.

I love gargoyles; hell, I nearly put a gargoyle cop on the cover of my novel. Nightmares in the Sky definitely scratched my itch. All in all, a really awesome coffee table book.

And seriously, watch Gargoyles. As John Kenneth Muir relates here, it's a nice little allegory for racial tension with Emmy-winning make-up: Planet of the Apes with Wings. ( )

Make no mistake, the stars of the show for this book are the amazing artwork on the sculptures themselves and the photography that brings these images to us. Stephen Kings contribution is no more than an essay and the essay itself isn't really on gargoyles per say, but more on the process of becoming involved in this project and the resultant way that gargoyles began to make him feel once he began to notice them in places that he'd never seen them before he was involved in this project.

All that being said, the text of the book goes for about the first 35 pages or so and is written in King's normal engaging, if a bit rambling, style. He really doesn't give too many actual facts on gargoyles and what facts he does give are supported by his own deductive reasoning. However, King manages to do what King does best: set the tone.

When I first got this book, I had to crack it open immediately and flip through the pages. I was surprised to see that after the first third of the book there was no more text, only images. The images themselves were very interesting photographs of very interesting sculptures, but that was mainly all that I got out of the first perusal. When I picked it up again and read the essay by King in context with the photos, I got an entirely different experience. Because the tone of the piece had been so expertly set up in King's seemingly haphazard way, the photos themselves gained more of their own life and meaning. Kings words gave a much more creepy vibe to what I was looking at in the rest of the book.

Overall, a fun book to own and flip through. It's not going to change your life...unless you start noticing gargoyles where-ever you go and begin to wonder why you hadn't noticed them before and why they always seem to be watching... ( )