04/25/2016
Lock has made a specialty of reimagining the American literary past: earlier works in what he calls the American Novels series took up Huck Finn and Walt Whitman (The Boy in His Winter and American Meteor, respectively). Now he fictionalizes Edgar Allan Poe, who takes the story’s narrator on a tour of darkness—the dark side of 1840s Philadelphia and the more nefarious workings of the human mind. When he meets Poe, naïve young Edward Fenzil becomes obsessed with him, readily falling under his “dark enchantment,” and as he tells the story 30 years later, it is clear that this moment has shaped his worldview, his life’s trajectory, and his sense of self. Poe plays rough—briefly shutting Fenzil up in a coffin, for instance, so he can pick Fenzil’s brain about the experience—but still Fenzil cannot tear himself away from Poe. In the language of the time, there is an affinity between them, but for Lock, that electric linking is also found in the power of story, which, as Fenzil says, functions as “a hook, a barb.” Indeed, Poe’s most lasting effect on Fenzil comes through a tale he writes (ably concocted by Lock). The problem here is that as a storyteller Fenzil lacks Poe’s concision: there is too much foreshadowing, too much rumination on the nature of evil, free will versus fate, and the sciences of mesmerism and phrenology. Yet this is a worthy volume in Lock’s American Novels series, and readers will find him to be an ideal guide for a trip into the past. (June)
Select Praise for Norman Lock’s The American Novels Series
“Norman Lock has created a memorable portrait gallery of American subjects, in a succession of audaciously imagined, wonderfully original, and beautifully written novels unlike anything in our literature.” —Joyce Carol Oates
“Shimmers with glorious language, fluid rhythms, and complex insights.” —NPR
“Our national history and literature are Norman Lock’s playground in his dazzling series, The American Novels. . . . [His] supple, elegantly plain-spoken prose captures the generosity of the American spirit in addition to its moral failures, and his passionate engagement with our literary heritage evinces pride in its unique character.” —Washington Post
“Lock writes some of the most deceptively beautiful sentences in contemporary fiction. Beneath their clarity are layers of cultural and literary references, profound questions about loyalty, race, the possibility of social progress, and the nature of truth . . . to create something entirely new—an American fable of ideas.” —Shelf Awareness
“[A] consistently excellent series. . . . Lock has an impressive ear for the musicality of language, and his characteristic lush prose brings vitality and poetic authenticity to the dialogue.” —Booklist
On The Boy in His Winter
“[Lock] is one of the most interesting writers out there. This time, he re-imagines Huck Finn’s journeys, transporting the iconic character deep into America’s past—and future.” —Reader’s Digest
On American Meteor
“[Walt Whitman] hovers over [American Meteor], just as Mark Twain’s spirit pervaded The Boy in His Winter. . . . Like all Mr. Lock’s books, this is an ambitious work, where ideas crowd together on the page like desperate men on a battlefield.” —Wall Street Journal
On The Port-Wine Stain
“Lock’s novel engages not merely with [Edgar Allan Poe and Thomas Dent Mütter] but with decadent fin de siècle art and modernist literature that raised philosophical and moral questions about the metaphysical relations among art, science and human consciousness. The reader is just as spellbound by Lock’s story as [his novel’s narrator] is by Poe’s. . . . Echoes of Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Freud’s theory of the uncanny abound in this mesmerizingly twisted, richly layered homage to a pioneer of American Gothic fiction.” —New York Times Book Review
On A Fugitive in Walden Woods
“A Fugitive in Walden Woods manages that special magic of making Thoreau’s time in Walden Woods seem fresh and surprising and necessary right now. . . . This is a patient and perceptive novel, a pleasure to read even as it grapples with issues that affect the United States to this day.” —Victor LaValle, author of The Ballad of Black Tom and The Changeling
On The Wreckage of Eden
“The lively passages of Emily [Dickinson’s]’s letters are so evocative of her poetry that it becomes easy to see why Robert finds her so captivating. The book also expands and deepens themes of moral hypocrisy around racism and slavery. . . . Lyrically written but unafraid of the ugliness of the time, Lock’s thought-provoking series continues to impress.” —Publishers Weekly
On Feast Day of the Cannibals
“Lock does not merely imitate 19th-century prose; he makes it his own, with verbal flourishes worthy of [Herman] Melville.” —Gay & Lesbian Review
On American Follies
“Ragtime in a fever dream. . . . When you mix 19th-century racists, feminists, misogynists, freaks, and a flim-flam man, the spectacle that results might bear resemblance to the contemporary United States.” —Library Journal (starred review)
On Tooth of the Covenant
“Splendid. . . . Lock masters the interplay between nineteenth-century [Nathaniel] Hawthorne and his fictional surrogate, Isaac, as he travels through Puritan New England. The historical details are immersive and meticulous.” —Foreword Reviews (starred review)
On Voices in the Dead House
“Gripping. . . . The legacy of John Brown looms over both Alcott and Whitman [in] a haunting novel that offers candid portraits of literary legends.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
On The Ice Harp
“In The Ice Harp, Norman Lock deftly takes us into the polyphonic swirl of Emerson’s mind at the end of his life, inviting us to meet the man anew even as the philosopher fights to stop forgetting himself. Who will I be when the words are gone, the great thinker wonders, and how will I know what is right? I gladly asked myself these same impossible questions on every page of this remarkably empathetic and deeply moral novel.” —Matt Bell, author of Appleseed and Refuse to Be Done
2016-03-16
Doppelgängers, literary intrigue, unhealthy obsessions, and a secret society of the death-obsessed menace a young man in this novel of 1840s Philadelphia. Lock's novel is structured as a long remembrance told by an aging doctor, Edward Fenzil, working in Camden, New Jersey, in 1876. The story he tells is about his life in Philadelphia 32 years earlier, when he worked as an assistant to Thomas Dent Mütter, a surgeon fond of medical oddities, and became acquainted with Edgar Allan Poe. Gradually, Poe initiates Fenzil into an subculture of people who work with death. Fenzil's mind begins to fray as he becomes fixated, first on Poe and then on his newly discovered doppelgänger. Both the presence of Poe and the fact that this is a long monologue by a not-necessarily-reliable narrator add an abundance of tension to the proceedings. Occasionally, the tone becomes dreamlike, as in a story told by a cohort of Poe's about the fate that befell the captain of a slave ship. This is the third in Lock's American Novels series: works that harken back to 19th-century history and culture. Each is self-contained, though readers of Lock's earlier American Meteor (2015) will note that the "Moran" to whom this novel is told is that novel's protagonist. (This book's chilling final sentence has a secondary meaning for those who have read its predecessor.) Beyond the presence of Poe, other literary figures hover on the book's margins—the framing story includes several mentions of Walt Whitman, and in his acknowledgements, Lock notes the influence of John Berryman's Dream Songs on one structural aspect of the novel. This chilling and layered story of obsession succeeds both as a moody period piece and as an effective and memorable homage to the works of Edgar Allan Poe.
