City of Dancing Gargoyles

by Tara Campbell

In the parched, post-apocalyptic Western U.S. of the 22nd Century, wolves float, bonfires sing, and devils gather to pray. Water and safety are elusive in this chaotic world of alchemical transformations, where history books bleed, dragons kiss, and gun-toting trees keep their own kind of peace. Among this menagerie of strange beasts, two sentient stone gargoyles, known only as " E" and " M," flee the rubble of their Southwestern church in search of water. Along the way, they meet climate refugees Dolores Baker and her mother Rose, who' ve escaped the ravaged West Coast in search of a safer home. This quartet forms an uneasy alliance when they hear of a new a mysterious city of dancing gargoyles. Or is it something more sinister? In this strange, terrible new world, their arrival at this elusive city could spark the destruction of everything they know. Tara Campbell summons fantastical magic in this kaleidoscopic new speculative climate fiction.

Genres: Fantasy, Science Fiction, Fiction, Dystopia, Speculative Fiction

282 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 3, 2024

About the author

Bio: Tara Campbell is an award-winning writer, teacher, Kimbilio Fellow, fiction co-editor at Barrelhouse, and graduate of American University's MFA in Creative Writing. Publication credits include Masters Review, Wigleaf, Electric Literature, CRAFT Literary, Uncharted Magazine, Daily Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, and Escape Pod/Artemis Rising.

She's the author of the eco sci-fi novel TreeVolution, two hybrid collections of poetry and prose, and two short story collections from feminist sci-fi publisher Aqueduct Press. Her sixth book, City of Dancing Gargoyles (SFWP), is a finalist for the 2025 Philip K. Dick Award and is on Reactor Magazine’s “Best Books of 2024” list and Locus Magazine's 2024 Recommended Reading List.

She teaches creative writing at venues such as Johns Hopkins University, Clarion West, The Writer's Center, and Hugo House. Find her at www.taracampbell.com

Reviews

[Siavahda · Rating 3 out of 5]

*I received this book for free from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.*

I was intrigued by the very weird premise, and City of Dancing Gargoyles definitely delivered on the weird!

Something Happened in the 22nd century, and now the North American continent is full of surreal, bizarre, and sometimes creepy Stuff, the vast majority of which is, thankfully, tied to specific locales. These areas are called Cities even when they’re more like towns or villages, size-wise. Are there any normal places left? Honestly, it doesn’t seem like it, but because the book is focused on the Cities, it’s possible there are normal areas that we just don’t see in Dancing.

Dancing is made up of alternating PoVs and storylines, which eventually intersect. E and M are sentient gargoyles, who strike out looking for a new home when their current one runs out of water (which they need to survive); Dolores is a teenager travelling with her spear-wielding mom looking for a safe place to live; and Meena and Joseph are travelling researchers, writing up reports on the different Cities they visit.

This isn’t a very plot-heavy book; it’s a lot of weirdness for the sake of weirdness, vibes, and an attempt at an Actual Plot stuffed in very unsatisfyingly at the last minute. But that doesn’t mean it’s not fun; I just think it’s a good idea not to go in expecting plot, or a traditional story-structure. The reports on the Cities can almost be treated like flash fiction or short stories, and although I didn’t find every City interesting – especially in the second half of the book it felt like Campbell was running out of ideas – they were still…amusing? A nice break from the other PoVs? I looked forward to them.

Some of the Cities were disturbing or even stomach-churning, but a) I’m a wimp, and b) it was clearly deliberate on Campbell’s part. There’s the City of Glaring Chocolates, where the chocolates have Opinions on the fact that they’re made only to be consumed; the City of Bleeding Books, which is exactly what it sounds like; and the City of Cringing Blankets, where blankets react to human shame. Some were pretty ridiculous, like the City of Gun-Toting Trees, and some didn’t go into NEARLY enough detail, like the City of Feasting Banshees, which is a one-page poem instead of a mini-short story like most of the other reports.

But some were amazing; the City of Failing Knives, which has extremely unique marriage customs; the City of Sailing Statues, where what statue sails to shore determines what kind of year the City will have; and the City of Bingeing Bats, where the humans have finally beaten a retreat. And plenty of the others!

The book did kind of fail when it attempted plot: Joseph starts going off the rails, but how or why, and how it’s resolved, either wasn’t explained or made no sense at all; and the gargoyles start Doing A Thing that comes out of nowhere and is ‘solved’ in about two seconds. There’s quite a few things that some characters know that others don’t, which is one of the reasons I think this might be the start of a series – Rose needs to find out what M did at some point, right? And some kind of eldritch being talked to Meena in a way that DEFINITELY implied there would be more stories in this setting. It works as a standalone if you let it, but not perfectly.

If you’d like a shot of weirdness, check this out, but if you need things to make sense, I’d recommend skipping this one.

[Alexandra · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this because Ian Mond told me to. I mean, not personally or directly, but he definitely recommended it within my hearing, and I took that to heart. I am very, very glad that I did.

This is not a linear narrative. As I was reading, I was trying to figure out what it reminded me of, and I finally realised: it's Christopher Priest's The Islanders. It's not identical, but there's a similarity in the way it tells a story through vignettes and moments. It's got a bit more traditional story-telling thrown in there than the Priest, I'll admit, but the comparison is still valid. Especially since I loved both.

The book is set at some point in the future - not too far future, there are no galactic empires; but also not quite tomorrow (sometime early in the 2100s-ish). Something... odd... has happened in the USA (insert joke here and then move on); something alchemical, perhaps. Previously inert things have been affected - built things, and natural things. The title gives you a suggestion of one way things have been changed. There are also towns where trees shoot guns, and a city where chocolates glare at you, where books fret, where blankets cringe and candles sob. Why? Absolutely no idea. Part of the story is told in communications between Meena Gupta and Joseph Evans to their boss, Manfred Himmelblau, as they go exploring and reporting on these places. Part of it is the experience of M and E - two gargoyles searching for their place in this new world. And part of it is about Dolores and her mother Rose, who are likewise looking for safety and community.

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.

[Dan Trefethen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This can be read a couple of ways: As a picaresque exercise in word play, simply combining a gerund and a noun randomly to follow the phrase “The City Of”, as in Dancing Gargoyles, Glaring Chocolates, Shrieking Ottomans, etc. As an exercise it's fun to randomly assign these terms and then come up with a chapter featuring an anthropologist's field notes about visiting that city.

That's part of the book.

The other part is a through-line about two of the gargoyles who go looking for others, finding a mother and daughter who reluctantly (at first) allow them to travel together. This is the meatier part of the story where the character development happens. It's a story about making unlikely friends, and who can be relied upon and who can't.

It's a funny book in many of the descriptions of the literal manifestations of the gerund/noun combinations, and a charming one especially when focused on the two gargoyles. The ending, I felt, was a bit soft considering the tension that was building towards it.

[Genesee Rickel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Told in a darkly whimsical tone with some amusing, off-beat humor, this mosaic novel stands out for its unique and captivating worldbuilding. Set in a dystopian future in Western United States, government experiments have triggered a series of awakenings - making the inanimate animate, and the non-sentient, sentient. Traversing this new land through the eyes of two groups - a set of "traveling researchers" who record their observations of places such as the "City of Glaring Chocolates" and the "City of Gun-Toting Trees", and climate refugees E and M (now-sentient gargoyles) and Rose and Dolores (a mother-daughter duo searching for refuge) who team up to find water and safety, what you have is a series of zany and uncanny vignettes alongside a tender blossoming friendship between E and Dolores that really carries the heart of the novel. Suggest this for readers who enjoy speculative fiction, to those who aren't afraid to dip their toes into horror, and for folks who appreciate novels that play with form.

[Shoshi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Super fun look at a post-apacolyptic Western US from the perspective of 2 researchers studying mysterious phenomena in Oregon, California and Nevada following possible Alchemical tests (left vague), a young woman traveling to a
safety w/her overprotective mom and an animated pair of Gargoyles. The cities the researchers visit, interspersed in the book, include philandering flowerpots, sailing statues and gun-toting trees.

[Isabelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book started out really promising. The world was just crazy. This was written by someone that just wanted to throw every crazy idea for world building into one book. And somehow that actually kind of worked—for a while.

I had a really hard time figuring out the storyline, but the weirdness was so out there that it was somehow really fun rather than off-putting. There was a lot of social commentary if you looked past the weirder aspects on the surface that I quite enjoyed deciphering and I’m sure I missed a good bit of it too as some of it was more obvious than others.

What I struggled with though is that eventually it did end up feeling like too much world building. The plot felt drowned out and too weak to hold its own up against all the crazy things that were going on in the book. And while I am a fan of world building, I also need a good story to go along with that. The characters seemed interesting for the most part but again, they just weren’t strong enough to hold up against the tide of weirdness. This book was too short to have that much shoved into it. There just wasn’t a good balance.

While I am always glad to read books that are different from the norm and I don’t regret this one either, I do wish they would land better for me more often. I do want to see what else the author has written, though I’m not sure how soon that’ll happen.

[Vanessa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve loved Tara Campbell’s wonderfully strange and often sly short stories (for instance, the marvelously weird and delightful “A Turtle in Love, Singing,” published in Bourbon Penn and available online—read it if you haven’t!) And so I jumped at the chance to read an advance copy of City of Dancing Gargoyles, due out in September of this year. It’s every bit as delightful and weird as I hoped, a post-apocalyptic road trip through an American West ravaged by both climate change and secret “alchemical” testing.

Three storylines converge in this novel. In the first, two sentient gargoyles, E and M, flee their church in a drought-ridden land in search of a new home. A few chapters in, they meet up with another questing pair: Dolores and Rose, a mother and her teen daughter who are also fleeing—in their case, fleeing a series of cities ruined by alchemical disasters, including a disaster brought about by dragons. Dolores and Rose are also looking for a new home, a place of stability. The quartet are at first reluctant allies, who then become devoted friends. The final storyline is perhaps the heart of this strange book: in a parallel quest, Meena and Joseph are citizen scientists, researchers who have been dispatched on a road trip through magical, alchemically-altered cities to gather data on the alchemical experiments that have changed the world.

And what wondrous, bizarre, magical and disquieting cities these are! There are cities where wolves float, where magicians fall, where bonfires sing, and where robots fight each other with swords. Cities where bats binge on blood, and where statues from the sea bring either good fortune and abundance, or horror. There’s a city where books endlessly fret, and another city where books bleed. Cities of horror and cities of delight.

Many of these cities confront their visitors (and by extension, we readers) with uncomfortable questions about human nature—about our own natures. In the City of Glaring Chocolates, would you eat a delicious piece of seemingly sentient chocolate, even as it glared at you?* How far would you go for the amusement of making a blanket cringe in the City of Cringing Blankets? What terrible things would you do, whose screams would you ignore or even relish, in the City of Shrieking Ottomans? What would you put up with for safety—or the illusion of safety—in the City of Gun-Toting Trees?

E and M, Dolores and Rose, Meena and Joseph—all six characters traverse this landscape of haunted cities, alone and in pairs or groups, telling each other (or, in the case of Meena and Joseph, telling their supervisor via filed reports) stories of the cities the others haven’t yet seen. The characters are all sympathetic, particularly E and Rose, who are particularly endearing and strike up a particularly warm friendship. Eventually, the storylines all converge in a most satisfying manner.

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.

*The ending lines of the chapter set in The City of Glaring Chocolates are an absolute stunner—but not something I want to spoil here. Please read it for yourself.

[Ian Mond]

I love small presses: Galley Beggar Press, Coffee House Press, Two Dollar Radio, Open Letter Press, and Akashic Books. I could go on. All of these publishers have produced the sort of cutting-edge, experimental (sometimes in translation) work that mainstream publishers generally avoid (unless written by a “big name” author).

Unfortunately, there simply aren’t the critics or the space to cover all these presses.* Take the Sante Fe Writer’s Project (or SFWP). If not for Tara Campbell (I reviewed her collection Midnight at the Organporium several years back**), I’d still be ignorant of this well-established independent press. They publish a mix of non-fiction, fiction and poetry, including Tara Campbell’s second novel, City of Dancing Gargoyles.

I don’t think a book like this gets published without an SFWP. Not because Tara Campbell isn’t a “big name” (although, frankly, she should be), but because it’s so unabashedly inventive and ambitious. Or, as I put it in my Locus review (you can read it in November), “a magnificent, post-apocalyptic buffet of weird magic, unexpected friendships and talking gargoyles”—and that’s not mentioning the gun-toting trees, the falling magicians, the glaring chocolates and the fretting books. Sound bizarre? You betcha. I doubt you’ll find a more imaginative novel written this year.

Whether rightly or wrongly, small presses act as an audition for the big time. If you can crack through the multiple gatekeepers, there’s a chance that a mainstream publisher will take note. They should all be taking note of Tara Campbell. This level of creativity and smarts and heart can’t be ignored. In the meantime—thank you to all the small presses, thank you to SFWP.

*Not least because most major venues—you know who—will typically only give a small press attention if that small press has unearthed an “important” author.
**Published by another small press in the incredible Aqueduct.

[Julie Capell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Talk about a book with layers . . . from the beginning, the combination of fantasy and sci-fi elements made it feel fresh. Then the stories within the story begin, the first one about a city where knives unite instead of divide, and I was getting an Aesop's Fables kind of vibe. Each story a beautifully crafted gem, filled with amazing images and presented via fanciful situations: Drunk Butterfly Farm, Glaring Chocolates, Falling Magicians, Sailing Statues, Bingeing Bats, Floating Wolves, Gurgling Windchimes, Flying Trumpets, Philandering Flowerpots, Sinking Ghosts (to name a few of my favorite chapters). But beneath the stories, commentaries on modern life: from our addiction to cell phones to industrialized food production to immigration to overconsumption to gun control to willful ignorance of past wrongs to racism to white privilege to death. All part of an epic hero's journey through a barely recognizable American West transformed by climate change (and maybe some magic).

Sounds heavy, but it's not, it's lyrical, helped along by the author's poetic sensibilities and exquisite writing. I lost count of the times I said "WOW" as I was reading.

"Now, when we hear the trumpets' salute, all of our moods lift at someone else's good fortune. Someone is tasting their first moments of life, or having their first kiss, or graduating from school, or getting their first paycheck, or their doctor is telling them they're cured--someone somewhere is experiencing a wonder."

And there's humor, too:

"Protecting your maidenhead with bashfulness is great and all, but have you tried wielding a sword?"

I know this is going to be one of my favorite books of 2025--and it's only mid-January!

[Clara Ward · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the sentient gargoyle and climate refugee team up we didn’t know we needed. In this tapestry of stories within stories, the path to understanding and friendship weaves through a landscape of fantastical unintended consequences. Interspersed with reports from two citizen scientists charged with exploring the idiosyncratic results of alchemical testing, we visit and revisit places like The City of Cringing Blankets, The City of Fretting Books, and my personal favorite, The City of Glaring Chocolates.

There are some strangely awkward and innocent conversations between protagonists, and the author doesn’t directly address several city dwellers’ unexamined beliefs. A great deal is left open to (challenge?) the imagination and empathy of the reader. That said, what might have been too much horror or existential angst in a more standard narrative becomes both more approachable and more complex in Tara Campbell’s profoundly weird future vision of the Western US.

Note: I have interacted with Tara on author panels due to shared interests. It was those interests that led to me reading and enjoying this book rather than any bias from having met Tara.

[Raima Larter · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a delightfully weird book! I loved this. Tara Campbell is a talented writer who really knows how to tell a story - and this novel is chock-full of them. The three main characters - a young woman named Dolores, a sentient gargoyle named E, and Meena, a citizen-scientist exploring the strange land they all find themselves in - come together as they try to make sense of what has happened to their world.

Some sort of alchemical testing in this world has created objects and situations that just haven't existed before - ropes that scream, books that bleed, libraries that leap, and so many other weird things. Meena tries to make sense of it, but Dolores and E just want to find a home, a safe place to live. Their unlikely friendship forms the narrative core of the book and I found myself getting very attached to both of them--but also sharing Meena's desire to understand what happened.

This books is full of lessons that sneak up on the reader, pearls of wisdom you might not expect in such a strange tale. I will be thinking about this amazing book for a long time.

[Myna · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was excited to read an advance copy of this imaginative new novel. The story follows a delightful pair of gargoyles, E and M, as they search for a safe haven in a weirdly-dystopian Western US. Other characters include a mother/daughter duo and a pair of researchers who are studying the effects of secret alchemical testing. Each stop along the way brings surprising contradictions, such as The City of Glaring Chocolates and The City of Drunk Butterflies. The author brings to life a cast of richly-complex characters, all trying to make their way in an unpredictable, harsh new land. I recommend this for readers who like climate fiction, new weird scifi/fantasy, road-trip adventures, and post-apocalyptic dystopias.

[Caroline Bock · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a fantastic, fantastical story -- climate change, gargoyles, a hero's journey, beautiful writing, and more!

I totally enjoyed Tara Campbell's City of Dancing Gargoyles -- it grabbed me from its very first sentence -- "What is the point of a creature created for rain when there is no more rain?" and throughout the journey with these fantastical fantastic gargoyles, E and M, to the mother and daughter wanderers they meet along their quest for water. It's a hero's journey in the depleted West. I was rooting for them all along the way -- it's cinematic in scope, with daring, beautiful writing.

I wasn't surprised to read that it's been short-listed for some big awards for speculative fiction -- it's a short novel that I think will stay with me for a long time!

[Torie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is so weird and just FUN, it's exactly what I wanted. Between E and M the come-to-sentience gargoyles, Rose and Dolores the mother-and-daughter refugee duo, and Meena and Joseph the scientific journalists in the wild American west apocalypse, there's no dull plotlines. Everything weaves together in a cohesive way, and the world is SO interesting. Meena and Joseph's chapter revolve around visiting various cities in the American west that are changed by "Alchemical testing" into strange and physics-defying realities. I could stay in this story for another hundred pages, easy, and I wish it was a little bit longer.

[Cari · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was lucky enough to secure an ARC of this book and enjoyed it thoroughly. Wonderful world-building and interesting characters. The way it all comes together is unique and it is not a book you can just skim through. The story isn't just handed to you on a plate, you have to put things together, and I found myself caring about what happened to the characters. Something about this book brought to my mind The Martian Chronicles, though I can't say exactly why.

[The Reading Ruru (Kerry) · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars or 5/10
World building in this book was totally bizarre (in a intriguing way) and once you got used to the different cities one can see how we are a wasteful, & more and more uncaring species.
Unfortunately the creativity of the cities didn't reach the plot and the I was left with SO MANY unanswered questions about what actually happened? Why and by whom - all I know is there was a test. Was it nuclear test, chemical, biological....etc etc

[K.E. Semmel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a terrific speculative fiction, one set in an altered future where inanimate objects come to life. Elements of fantasy mixed with literary fiction. Very creative and entertaining. Highly recommend.

[Varadia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really liked the world, and E and M, and E's friendship with Dolores, and M's protection of Dolores. And the hope in it. The bits with Meena and Joseph were also interesting. It felt hopeful. And like a beginning. Maybe a little rough in the dismount but I was so intrigued I don't care.

[Chris Tilley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I attended a writing workshop put on by the author and preordered the book based on that workshop. I enjoyed the book and the interwoven storylines. It took me a while to notice the interconnectedness of the stories and the underlying social justice themes.

[Allison OC · Rating 5 out of 5]

As engaging an enquiry as I've ever read. I was constantly thirsty for more, and it just kept providing.

[Blue · Rating 3 out of 5]

Unlike anything else I've read. I liked the unique premise but the plot just didn't come together for me.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. Odd, surreal, bizarre, but still compelling. Follows two now-sentient gargoyles trying to find a new home in their transfigured and transformed post-apocalyptic world, alternating with chapters about some of the truly, deeply weird transformed cities visited by two human researchers.

[Kurt Baumeister · Rating 5 out of 5]

Campbell's witty, crisply written, and intensely imaginative City of Dancing Gargoyles brings us a future dystopia filled with characters that may be gargoyles, but nonetheless stay with you long after reading. In spite of its blend of the speculative and eco-fabulist there's an immediacy to the descriptions that fully immerses you in Campbell's world. Marry that with an odd, yet undeniable pathos and it's easy to see why this book is getting attention from award committees and why Campbell's writing is finally getting the attention it deserves. Highly recommended.

[Allison Wyss · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wrote about the stunning opening to this book and the way it unsettles, dazzles, and even decenters humanity:

https://loft.org/writers-block-blog/c...