The year is around 2120. The western United States has dried up due to climate change, and a government experiment in alchemy has animated the inanimate — gargoyles included — and endowed certain plants and animals with quasi-human consciousness and abilities. Global markets and centralized governments have deteriorated, but humans carry on, either on the road or in cities, where we contend with bewitched, sometimes aggressive neighbors such as “floating wolves.”

We mostly travel through the world of City of Dancing Gargoyles, author Tara Campbell’s second novel, with six characters: E and M, two gargoyles come to life; Dolores and Rose, a mother-daughter pair in search of a new home; and Joseph and Meena, citizen-scientists doing field research for a mysterious scientific agency.

The journey of the first four characters drives the narrative. Drought forces E and M to leave the church to which they were previously — and literally — attached in search of water (in Campbell’s world, gargoyles need water to survive). They meet Dolores and Rose on the road and hold hostage one of the women’s special canteens, which captures water from the air. M and Rose gradually calm their mutual suspicion of the other’s species as the group travels toward a more plentiful source of water, and E and Dolores forge a tight friendship. Eventually, the foursome reaches Carson City, an oasis with an economy propped up by nearby Lake Tahoe. There they remain until the promise of a city populated solely by gargoyles lures E and M into the desert.

Email exchanges between Joseph, Meena, and a leader at the enigmatic agency comprise the other half of the novel. Their shared mission ostensibly is to investigate the bewitched objects, flora, and fauna in the remaining cities across the West, as well as how cultural practices have changed with the times.

Many of the emails read like parables. One describes the City of Gun-Toting Trees, where trees have become a kind of Big Brother with perfect aim. Among others, they shoot and kill a bootlegger, the town drunk, and a woman who left her holiday decorations up too long. Residents privately worry if they’ll be next, while conceding they’d be in as much or more danger elsewhere. The lesson of these parables, in sum, is that humans are no longer Earth’s main characters. We never were, of course, but Campbell’s world forces us to surrender, or at least temper, our narcissism.

This point is trite and often blunt. Campbell’s keener and more enjoyable insight in these email reports is that, even in a dramatically different and more dangerous world, day-to-day human life will still be mundane, and the struggle to create meaning will persist. Residents of the City of Leaping Libraries have grown accustomed to waiting for book repositories to touch down nearby. In another city, the appearance of flying trumpets — which signal wonders of nature or good news — has become infrequent, partially because folks are bored with weddings and sunrises.

Although these emails eventually intertwine with the journey of E, M, Dolores, and Rose, they function more like a survey of the author’s fictional world and overshadow the development of the novel’s protagonists. Campbell’s use of multiple points of view also may hinder readers’ ability to connect with the main characters; we get to know all six a little and none very well. They largely remain sketches.

Given the nature of the environmental crisis — which sprawls across space and time — climate fiction tends to wrestle with the problem of breadth versus depth. Consider Annie Proulx’s novel Barkskins, which documents the 300-year decimation of North American forests after European colonization, a tragic and fascinating trajectory that churns through so many characters, it’s difficult to feel invested in any of them. The dilemma seems intractable: How can writers depict the scale of climate change while staying true to the essential intimacy of the novel?

A difficult truth may be that authors of climate fiction cannot count on the gravity of their premise or the novelty and cleverness of their science (or magic). City of Dancing Gargoyles is horizontally packed with surprising, imaginative experiments in human adaptation, and the stakes of the story are high. But high stakes — even when they involve saving the world — become much lower when they’re impersonal.

Matt Fleck is a writer, editor, and aspiring filmmaker based in Washington, DC.

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