Books by Norman Lock

Shadowplay

by L. R. Lam, Norman Lock

Fiction. In Java, a master of the shadow-puppet theater seeks to possess--by his art--a woman, who perishes as though by the contagion of his unnatural desire. SHADOWPLAY is a meditation on story-telling as an act of seizure, a parable of obsession and of the danger of confounding the real with its representations. "[A] journey as delicious as it is threatening"--R.M. Berry. "[Lock's] prose is melodial, and alert to every signal from the unseen"--Gary Lutz. "Wise up and get all you can of Lock"--Gordon Lish. "All hail Lock, whose narrative soul sings fairy tales..."--Kate Bernheimer. "Lock channels...our gorgeous desolation, our longing for connection, both earthly and divine"--Dawn Raffel.

Shadowplay

by L. R. Lam, Norman Lock

"[A] fantastical, richly drawn, poignant take on a classic coming-of-age story . . . a vibrant tale told with surety and grace" – Leigh Bardugo

In the second installment of the Micah Grey Trilogy from the award-winning, USA Today-bestselling author of Dragonfall, Micah must learn two types of magic—one for the stage, and one with deadlier consequences—while navigating a tender new love

Old magics are waking. Will the world survive their return?

Micah Grey almost died when he fled the circus with Drystan. Now he and the ex-clown must use Glamours to disguise themselves and hide in the once-grand Kymri Theatre, run by a once-renowned magician, Jasper Maske. Drystan claims Maske’s stage magic is all smoke and mirrors, but where’s the line between trickery and real power?

Micah and Drystan will soon learn the answer, when Maske's arch-nemesis challenges him—and by extension, Micah and Drystan—to a duel that will seal all of their fates.

Meanwhile, the Shadow still haunts Micah’s steps, and as the duel draws near, Micah increasingly suffers from dark visions. Events that destroyed the ancient world are being replayed. Can Micah's latent powers break this deadly pattern?

In this rich and evocative second novel of the Micah Grey series, L.R. Lam blends a coming-of-age story, queer romance, and magical powers into a charming and original fantasy world, inspired by Victorian Scotland.

Love Among the Particles

by Norman Lock

“Topical, astonishing and provocative . . . a masterful collection.” —Shelf Awareness for Readers (starred review)

“[Lock’s stories] are gems, rich in imagination and language . . . For all their convolutions of space and time, these stories are remarkably easy to follow and savor.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Mr. Hyde finally reveals his secrets to an ambitious journalist, unleashing unforeseen horrors. An ancient Egyptian mummy is revived in 1935 New York to consult on his Hollywood biopic. A Brooklynite suddenly dematerializes and passes through the internet, in search of true love…

Love Among the Particles is virtuosic storytelling, at once a poignant critique of our romance with technology and a love letter to language. In a whirlwind tour of space, time, and history, Norman Lock creates worlds that veer wildly from the natural to the supernatural via the pre-modern, mechanical, and digital ages. Whether reintroducing characters from the pages of Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twain, Franz Kafka, and Gaston Leroux, or performing dizzying displays of literary pyrotechnics, these stories are nothing less than a compendium of the marvelous.

Norman Lock is the award-winning author of novels, short fiction, and poetry, as well as stage, radio, and screenplays. He has won The Dactyl Foundation Literary Fiction Award, The Paris Review Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, and writing fellowships from the New Jersey Council on the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Aberdeen, New Jersey.

The Boy in His Winter: An American Novel (The American Novels)

by Norman Lock

Huck Finn’s mythic adventures—and childhood—abruptly end when he steps off his raft into Hurricane Katrina
Huck Finn and Jim float on their raft across a continuum of shifting seasons, feasting on a limitless supply of fish and stolen provisions, propelled by the currents of the mighty Mississippi from one adventure to the next. Launched into existence by Mark Twain, they have now been transported by Norman Lock through three vital, violent, and transformative centuries of American history. As time unfurls on the river’s banks, they witness decisive battles of the Civil War, the betrayal of Reconstruction’s promises to the freed slaves, the crushing of Native American nations, and the electrification of a continent. While Jim enters real time when he disembarks the raft in the Jim Crow South, Huck finally comes of age when he’s washed up on shore during Hurricane Katrina. An old man in 2077, Huck takes stock of his life and narrates his own story, revealing our nation’s past, present, and future as Mark Twain could never have dreamed it.
The first stand-alone book in The American Novels series, The Boy in His Winter is a tour-de-force work of imagination, beauty, and courage that re-envisions a great American literary classic for our time.

The Wreckage of Eden (The American Novels)

by Norman Lock

A nineteenth-century army chaplain confesses his loss of faith in God and country to his first love, poet Emily Dickinson
When U.S. Army chaplain Robert Winter first meets Emily Dickinson, he is fascinated by the brilliance of the strange girl immersed in her botany lessons. She will become his confidante, obsession, and muse over the years as he writes to her of his friendship with the aspiring politician Abraham Lincoln, his encounter with the young newspaperman Samuel Clemens, and his crisis of conscience concerning the radical abolitionist John Brown. Bearing the standard of God and country through the Mexican War and the Mormon Rebellion, Robert seeks to lessen his loneliness while his faith is eroded by the violence he observes and ultimately commits. Emily, however, remains as elusive as her verse on his rare visits to Amherst and denies him solace, a rejection that will culminate in a startling epiphany at the very heart of his despair.
Powerfully evocative of Emily Dickinson’s life, times, and artistry, this fifth stand-alone book in The American Novels series captures a nation riven by conflicts that continue to this day.

A Fugitive in Walden Woods (The American Novels)

by Norman Lock

Henry David Thoreau’s principles are tested when a young man escapes from slavery into Walden Woods
In Norman Lock’s fourth stand-alone book of The American Novels series, Samuel Long escapes slavery in Virginia, traveling the Underground Railroad to Walden Woods where he encounters Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Lloyd Garrison, and other transcendentalists and abolitionists. While Long will experience his coming-of-age at Walden Pond, his hosts will receive a lesson in human dignity, culminating in a climactic act of civil disobedience.
Against this historical backdrop, Lock’s powerful narrative examines issues that continue to divide the United States: racism, privilege, and what it means to be free in America.

Feast Day of the Cannibals (The American Novels)

by Norman Lock

A bankrupt merchant encounters Herman Melville and is pursued through the depths of Gilded Age Manhattan by a brutal antagonist
In the sixth stand-alone book in The American Novels series, Shelby Ross, a merchant ruined by the depression of 1873–79, is hired as a New York City Custom House appraiser under inspector Herman Melville, the embittered, forgotten author of Moby-Dick. On the docks, Ross befriends a genial young man and makes an enemy of a despicable one, who attempts to destroy them by insinuating that Ross and the young man share an unnatural affection. Ross narrates his story to his childhood friend Washington Roebling, chief engineer of the soon-to-be-completed Brooklyn Bridge. As he is harried toward a fate reminiscent of Ahab’s, he encounters Ulysses S. Grant, dying in a brownstone on the Upper East Side; Samuel Clemens, who will publish Grant’s Memoirs; and Thomas Edison, at the dawn of the electrification of the city.
Feast Day of the Cannibals charts the harrowing journey of a tormented heart during America’s transformative age.

The Port-Wine Stain (The American Novels)

by Norman Lock

A young surgical assistant faces his doppelgänger in a chilling tale featuring Edgar Allan Poe and a “lost” Poe story.
In his third stand-alone book of The American Novels series, Norman Lock recounts the story of a young Philadelphian, Edward Fenzil, who, in the winter of 1844, falls under the sway of two luminaries of the nineteenth-century grotesque imagination: Thomas Dent Mütter, a surgeon and collector of medical “curiosities,” and Edgar Allan Poe. As Fenzil struggles against the powerful wills that would usurp his identity, including that of his own malevolent doppelgänger, he loses his mind and his story to another.
The Port-Wine Stain is a gothic psychological thriller whose themes are possession, identity, and storytelling that the master, Edgar Allan Poe, might have been proud to call his own.

American Meteor

by Norman Lock

A scrappy Brooklyn orphan turned vengeful assassin narrates a visionary tale of the American West

In this panoramic tale of Manifest Destiny--the second stand-alone book in The American Novels series--Stephen Moran comes of age with the young country that he crosses on the Union Pacific, just as the railroad unites the continent. Propelled westward from his Brooklyn neighborhood and the killing fields of the Civil War to the Battle of Little Big Horn, he befriends Walt Whitman, receives a medal from General Grant, becomes a bugler on President Lincoln's funeral train, goes to work for railroad mogul Thomas Durant, apprentices with frontier photographer William Henry Jackson, and stalks General George Custer. When he comes face-to-face with Crazy Horse, his life will be spared but his dreams haunted for the rest of his days.

By turns elegiac and comic, American Meteor is a novel of adventure, ideas, and mourning: a unique vision of America's fabulous and murderous history.

Eden's Clock

by Norman Lock

A disabled Civil War veteran makes an epic, westward journey toward a fateful encounter with author Jack London, only hours before the 1906 San Francisco earthquake

Rendered mute at the Battle of Gettysburg, Frederick Heigold returns to Dobbs Ferry, New York, where he marries a resolute suffragist and resumes his vocation as a clocksmith. Bereft after she dies in a freak accident, he accepts a commission to repair the enormous clock on the San Francisco Embarcadero, but the routine railway journey becomes a six-month odyssey. Finally reaching the Pacific, after having survived imprisonment, shipwreck on Edisto Island, and run-ins with assorted roughnecks and thieves, he happens upon novelist Jack London drinking in the Palace Hotel bar--just before one of the deadliest natural disasters in United States history.

Eden's Clock, the twelfth and final stand-alone book in The American Novels series, calls into question the American belief in individualism to shape our destiny when confronted with irrepressible, chaotic forces.