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The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson

It starts with the nameless narrator experiencing a near-fatal car crash due to his drug and alcohol induced hallucinations. During his lengthy recovery in the burn ward, he meets a psych patient who alleges their story begins 700 years ago in a German monastery. She tells him stories about their past in Germany, including how she obtained and translated a copy of Dante's Inferno predating all known German translations. She tells other stories too, about a Japanese glass craftswoman, an Icelandic Viking, an Italian blacksmith, maybe some others, most of whom die young and tragically. She's also a talented sculptor of stone gargoyles, a skill she allegedly learned from the narrator. The narrator suspects her stories are just the delusions of a schizophrenic, but can't go back to his pre-accident life, so he agrees to go home with her to continue his recovery, and maybe learn a little more about her and why she's taken an interest in him.

I'm about 3/4 through it and impressed with how it's written. Unfortunately, I never read the Divine Comedy, so I'm pretty sure I missed some things that a better educated reader would have recognized.