"Following my accident, I plumped up like a freshly roasted wiener, my skin cracking to accommodate the expanding meat. The doctors, with their hungry scalpels, hastened the process with a few quick slices. The procedure is called an escharotomy, and it gives the swelling tissue the freedom to expand. It's rather like the uprising of your secret inner being, finally given license to claw through the surface. The doctors thought they had sliced me open to commence my healing but, in fact, they only released the monster - a thing of engorged flesh, suffused with juice. While a small burn results in a blister filled with plasma, burns such as mine result in the loss of enormous quantities of liquid. In my first twenty-four hospital hours, the doctors pumped six gallons of isotonic liquid into me to counteract the loss of bodily fluids. I bathed in the liquid as it flowed out of my scorched body as fast as it was pumped in, and I was something akin to the desert during a flash flood...
...The doctors removed my wasteland exterior by debriding me, scraping away the charred flesh. They brought in tanks of liquid nitrogen containing skin recently harvested from corpses. The sheets were thawed in pans of water, then neatly arranged on my back and stapled into place. Just like that, as if they were laying strips of sod over the problem areas behind their summer cabins, they wrapped me in the skin of the dead. My body was cleansed constantly but I rejected these sheets of necro-flesh anyway; I've never played well with others. So over and over again, I was sheeted with cadaver skin. There I lay, wearing dead people as armor against death."Slowly, throughout the first chapter, the character is introduced - as a burn victim and a character simultaneously - to the reader. Davidson trades off, first describing a level of burn treatment in the first twenty-four hours, and then describing the main character's fairly tragic childhood. It is this tragic childhood, one way or another, and the ability to maintain an erection for long periods of time, that brought the main character into his career as a porn star.
So, the main character is hospitalized, with burns that will alter everything he knew about himself and his life - his looks, his job, and oh - his penis, which was completely incinerated in the fire. Naturally, the incredibly material, vain, main character is planning a glorious suicide when the strange, mentally ill, Marianne Engel walks into his life. Marianne Engel claims she is over seven hundred years old, and that our main character has now been burned three times in the time that she has known him. Steadily, Marianne Engel begins to become more and more of an influence in the main character's life. Thus beginning the transformation of our beloved vain porn star into something like a decent human being.
My only complaint about the novel is the level of religion that is present in the story, and I'm not even that bothered by the presence of Christianity, as it plays a key role in the story, and it's a novel we're talking about. The definition of a novel, by the way, is "a fictitious prose narrative of book length, typically representing character and action with some degree of realism." In the beginning of the novel, it is a known fact that Marianne Engel is just plain crazy. Throughout the book, though, more and more is learned about her, and the reader is allowed an opinion of their own.
I won't spoil anything, but it's a damn good read.
