STORY and PHOTOGRAPHS by K.B. DIXON

Originally there was a difference between “gargoyles” and “grotesques.” A gargoyle was a grotesque figure with an architectural purpose. It was an ornamental waterspout that protected buildings from rainwater damage. A grotesque had no such architectural purpose. This distinction lost its importance over time and is now pretty much the province of pedants. In addition to protecting the building from rainwater damage, the gargoyle with its fearsome mien was thought to protect the building from evil spirits by frightening them away. In the hands of gifted sculptors, they eventually became too frightening for their own good. They came to be understood not as protectors, but as malevolent presences themselves—as demons, as monsters.

These stylized nightmares acquired a special literary meaning in the twentieth century, offering a metaphorical representation of contemporary concerns to writers interested in the irrational, the abnormal, the bizarre, and the damaged—writers like Edgar Allan Poe, Flannery O’Connor, Sherwood Anderson, William Faulkner, and Nathaniel West.

They have also come to be part of Halloween. They decorate Haunted Houses from Portland to Poughkeepsie—most as monsters (bat-winged variations a particular favorite), but occasionally at the humbler fêtes of conservative “originalists” as protectors of the social order.

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The gargoyles here are my office mates—symbolic allusions to menacing office mates everywhere. I have not given any of them names for fear of offending.

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