Book Review: GARGOYLE SAFARI

Gargoyle Safari
Luciano Marano
JournalStone Publishing (February 20, 2026)
Reviewed by Andrew Byers

Luciano Marano is a name I should have paid attention to until now, and if you read small press magazines you probably already have – he comes up Night script, PseudoPod, Chthonic Matter Quarterlyand Best hardcore horror of the year For about a decade, he has the Wolf Novel Trilogy (The Moon Ambush Cycle) and the Thomas-Harris Dickens Christmas Novel.Humbug, Crystal Lake) behind him. Gargoyle Safari is his debut collection: fourteen stories, twelve of them reprinted from 2017 to 2024, plus two originals. CM Muller, who edited Night script And now it goes chthonic matterContributes to the introduction, in which he says that the Marano range is amazing. He’s not wrong, exactly, but I want to expand on that a bit because I think the opposite of range is interesting in this book.

Here’s what I noticed about a third of the way through. Marano is a photojournalist by profession, and this collection is all about holding a camera. The opening, “Mythologizing Timber Prescott in Five Featured Photos,” resurrects the dead influencer entirely from his own channel. “Witness” follows a burned-out news photographer who beats cops to a wreck on a freeway and discovers something far worse than the wreckage at the scene. “Hāʻole” is told by a Vietnam combat photographer who tells the story of his dead friend’s last ghost because no one else will. My Eyes Are Closed on Your Light is about a graduate student who puts together a book from the pages of a missing horror writer’s final manuscript. Four different sub-genres, one preoccupation: what it’s worth to deliberately look at something terrible and write it down. This is not a range; It’s the main theme of the collection, and it’s better than the blurbs give Marano credit for.

Gargoyle Safari It is best when these worries pass. “Timber Prescott” opens with the line, “It helps that he’s dead now, because we never thought of him as a real person,” and then proceeds to build on it. “My eyes are closed to your light” is what I would pass on to a companion first. Its missing author is called Kane Stryker, which is your first clue, and the story ends with a dedication – a book in itself – reading “To Carl Eduard Wagner: Something Special for the Last Wolf, From a Grateful Fan”. Marano has written a story about a drunken, difficult, controversial master of the genre who disappears, leaving behind writings that keep coming, and an ambitious student who intends to make a career out of it, whether he survives or not. If you know what happened to Wagner, the story goes like a punch. If not, it still works as a nasty little work on literary vampirism.

The title story, one of two originals in this collection, is an occult-detective noir about a fortune-teller for hire who is summoned to his hometown because someone is taking a hammer to the town’s gargoyles and throwing pieces at the run. He’s got the best booming voice in the book – “What kind of lunatic jogs around this neighborhood?” – and a really good ending, in which the narrator, having learned what is really happening in the center of the city, takes over the public art fund and starts ordering new monsters. The point is, it’s clearly a pilot. The dead alchemist, the father lost in the subway tunnels, the source of all the shadows – none of this is resolved here, and I think Marano is going to get back to him. I hope he does; Tomorrow I will read a novel set in that world.

Elsewhere: ‘Till the Road Runs Out’ is a splatterpunk record, with queer Bonnie and Clyde clashing with a death-worshipping cult, and it’s every bit as nasty as advertised. Scary Sophie’s Brief, Reluctant Retirement and Shocking Resurgence, another original, gives the late-night TV horror host a Halloween showdown with a fan who has taken her act to heart. And then there’s “Gun in the Sunset,” which is a two-page spread told by Ernest Hemingway about Gun in the Morning in Ketchum, and which is the kind of thing that either makes you want to put the book down or makes you want to go tell someone about it. Now I will tell you about it.

Now the honest part. Marano has a tic, and you can’t miss it in a book of this size: He loves a narrator who opens up by explaining the rules of storytelling. “Black Dog Blues” opens with “Choosing sides; that’s what you do when you tell a story like this.” “Hāʻole” begins with the words: “Stories like this reveal more about the teller than the subject, in my experience.” “Love is a ghost you see with your heart” produces a page of beautiful quiet prose and then breaks the frame with “Pretty good start, isn’t it?” Individually, these are all good steps. Arranged in a relatively short collection, throat clearing starts to feel like the default setting, and I wanted to break up the pattern by rearranging the running order.

It is the argument about the debut that is the strongest. What Marano lacks in many of his contemporaries is a reporter’s habit of noticing specific things—the meth lab in the dub’s back bedroom, the carpet the color of an improbable child’s finger painting, the bartender who was nicer to him four days ago. Gargoyle Safari He’s cooked where he needs to be, calm where he needs to be, and smarter about his technique than he lets on. If you like your horror inked, this is an easy recommendation.