Fiction. Norman Lock's GRIM TALES is a mythological catalog of the peculiar, a string of strange, often murderous urban myths. It comes on fast and dirty, wasting no time in lunging at your throat.... GRIM TALES is populated end to end with the magical and the bizarre: shape-shifting, witchery, underwater cities, indoor rain, beds that contain oceans, murderous objects, all manner of disappearance. Men lose their faces to mirrors, women are smothered by their hair, clouds settle over cities and suck them up...and in the midst of all this looming, Lock has an incredible ability to render compelling imagery and demeanor in minute, super-compressed bursts. Single lines resound in the mind. In the same way that it's hard to stop staring at the internet's seemingly endless array of weird memes and video databases, Lock's words are both engrossing and slightly haunted. One could spend forever worming through these magicked words, their worlds.

Author City: Aberdeen, NJ USA

Norman Lock is the author of numerous works of fiction, as well as stage and radio plays, including The House of Correction (Broadway Play Publishing, 1988), A History of the Imagination (FC2, 2004), Land of the Snowmen (Calamari Press, 2005), The Long Rowing unto Morning (Ravenna Press, 2007), The King of Sweden (Ravenna Press, 2009), SHADOWPLAY (Ellipsis Press, 2009), GRIM TALES (Mud Luscious Press, 2011), and PIECES FOR SMALL ORCHESTRA & OTHER FICTIONS (Spuyten Duyvil, 2011). He is a recipient of the Aga Kahn Prize given by The Paris Review, prose fellowships awarded by both the New Jersey and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and, in 2011, a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Aberdeen, New Jersey, with his wife, Helen.

Reviews and Other Links
author site
Blake Butler in The Believer
interview by Blake Butler @ Hobart
Paul Charles Griffin @ Bookslut