City of Dancing Gargoyles

Reviews

"In this wild postapocalyptic outing... Campbell’s unfettered imagination is sure to win readers over. Quirky and occasionally mystifying...offers plenty to entertain."

~Publishers Weekly, full review

"...City of Danc­ing Gargoyles is a magnificent, postapocalyptic buffet of weird magic, unexpected friendships, and talking gargoyles... [Campbell] performs an act of literary alchemy, transforming death and misery into something strange, dangerous, and always remarkable. I adored every page of this book, and I think you will also."

~Review by Ian Mond, Locus Magazine

Tara Campbell’s City of Dancing Gargoyles tells the story of two sentient gargoyles, E and M, who set off in search of water and encounter strange cities with even stranger residents. It’s wonderfully surreal post-apocalyptic fantasy climate fiction.

~Alex Brown, Reviewers’ Choice: The Best Books of 2024, 

Reactor (formerly Tor.com)

"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."

~Review by Vanessa Fogg, author of The Lillies of Dawn and The House of Illusionists and Other Stories

"When you’re looking for books that really use “what if” as an integral part of the story’s DNA, City of Dancing Gargoyles is a perfect example. Not only does it explore what humans would do in a post-apocalyptic, alchemically-altered United States, but also nonhumans and inanimate objects. Then, Campbell takes it one step further and explores how all this might coexist and coalesce."

~What If?: 8 Thought-Provoking Books that Explore the Possibilities, Lyndsie Manusos, Book Riot

"It’s a beautiful book. It’s about identity, and dealing with change and opposition and the weird, and finding community. It’s somehow also about the things that are already remarkable in our world by imagining how things might go really (really weird). An utter delight."

~Review by Alexandra Pierce, editor of "Letters to Tiptree" and "Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia E Butler"

"Campbell's genre-smashing work hovers somewhere between literary fiction, science fiction, and the weird, and nowhere is this truer than in her latest book, City of Dancing Gargoyles, in which an unlikely foursome of humans and gargoyles travel the western U.S., finding each city overtaken by a newly sentient object or entity. The novel is an apocalyptic delight, playing with form and agency even as it takes a grimly absurd look at climate disaster."

~Allison Wyss, Author of "Splendid Anatomy," 2022 Shirley Jackson Awards finalist, in Rain Taxi Interview Winter 2024

Interviews

Speculative Fiction on a Sliding Scale: A Conversation Between K.E. Semmel & Tara Campbell -- JMWW

Jean-Paul Garnier interviews Tara Campbell -- Vector from the British Science Fiction Association

INTERVIEW: Tara Campbell (City of Dancing Gargoyles) -- The Racket

Crossover Sci-Fi Author Tara Campbell Comes Home With a New Novel -- Washington City Paper

Tara Campbell Continues Book Tour at Hugo House -- The Evergreen Echo

"Dinos and Dragons and Ghosts, Oh My!: Up Close with the Gargoyle E" -- The Writer's Center Magazine

Interview with Constance Malloy at The Burning Hearth

"The World is an Uncomfortable Place" -- interview in X-R-A-Y Lit Mag

"Beyond the Bounds of Realism" -- interview in Uncharted Magazine

Advance Praise for City of Dancing Gargoyles

"This strange, sharp warning of a novel is a little bit Calvino, a little bit Atwood, and a little bit Anne Carson - but the monsters and the cities and the post apocalyptic landscape are entirely Tara Campbell originals, bleak and wry and brilliantly written. I'd read pretty much anything Campbell writes, and this one had me hooked from the opening lines."

~Amber Sparks, author of And I Do Not Forgive You and The Unfinished World

"City of Dancing Gargoyles is a book that will leave you thirsty, an epistolary arroyo of rocky beauty, a kind of love like the scraping of stone teeth."

~Meg Elison, Hugo and Locus award winning author

"A Le Guinian travelogue of brilliantly imagined places, a post-apocalyptic gargoyle buddy road trip, a meditation on finding your home and finding your people, and how those aren't always the same thing. This was delightful."

~Sarah Pinsker, Nebula and Hugo Award- winning author of A Song For A New Day and Haunt Sweet Home

"Stones with wings, fearful blankets, angry candy, wind chimes who would rather gurgle than ring--everything in this weird, post-apocalyptic landscape is alive! City of Dancing Gargoyles intertwines the research of fledgling academics with the epic journeys of human and magical climate refugees, near-future families seeking new homes, new lives. Campbell fills our minds with the glorious improbabilities they encounter, depicting changes that test the fragile boundaries around what we’ve always thought could happen. Sharp and true, her language brings us face-to-face with the inescapable wonders surrounding both them and us every day, in every way."

~Nisi Shawl, multiple award-winning author of Kinning, Everfair, and Speculation

"Campbell deftly weaves between absurdist worlds and a post-apocalyptic journey across a parched American landscape, never losing sight of the poetry of the human condition. An eerily prescient adventure across a drought-ridden America, with Tara Campbell’s signature in every line: dark absurdism and existential whimsy with a heartbeat. If you want to imagine six impossible things before breakfast, read this book."

~Yohanca Delgado, O. Henry Prize Winner, co-author with Janelle Monáe: The Memory Librarian

"Carrying on the post-apocalyptic experimental coolness of Dhalgren, written in an effervescent style, with unexpected humor & characters who will stay with you."

~Raven Belasco, author of the Blood & Ancient Scrolls series

"In the metaphorically deft City of Dancing Gargoyles, trees wield guns, books bleed, ghosts sink into rising waters, and creatures of flesh and of stone alike are seekers in a climate-ravaged world. This is a trippy, engrossing, visually-stunning zoetrope of a novel, swirling with storytelling that warns us, moves us, and changes us. Tara Campbell has written a singular eco-fantasy that is an exciting addition to the literary canon of the U.S. West."

~Sharma Shields, author of The Cassandra and The Sasquatch Hunter's Almanac

"Inventive, absorbing, and utterly original, Tara Campbell's City of Dancing Gargoyles sweeps readers into a near future landscape plagued by both the familiar and strange, and populated with the most surprising of characters. At once a post-apocalyptic fantasy and an intricate fable about how to navigate a transformed world, Campbell's brilliant novel left me transfixed."

~Talia Lakshmi Kolluri, author of What We Fed To The Manticore

“One day our world will be ruined, unfortunately, but when it is, may it be as wondrous as the ruined world in Tara Campbell’s City of Dancing Gargoyles. These are strange and beautiful cities you need to spend some time in.”

~Rion Amilcar Scott, author of The World Doesn’t Require You

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