| Literature |
| Historical Fiction |
| Romance |
| Fiction |
| 9781942658078 |
Summary
Summary
"Mesmerizingly twisted, richly layered." -- New York Times Book Review
"[Norman Lock's fiction] shimmers with glorious language, fluid rhythms, and complex insights." -- NPR
In his third 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 M#65533;tter, 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 doppelg#65533;nger, he loses his mind and his story to another.
Norman Lock is the award-winning author of novels, short fiction, and poetry, as well as stage, radio, and screenplays. His recent works of fiction include the short story collection Love Among the Particles , a Shelf Awareness Best Book of the Year, and three books in The American Novels series: The Boy in His Winter , a reenvisioning of Mark Twain's classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that Scott Simon of NPR's Weekend Edition hailed for "make[ing] Huck and Jim so real you expect to get messages from them on your iPhone"; American Meteor , an homage to Walt Whitman and William Henry Jackson named a Firecracker Award finalist and Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year; and The Port-Wine Stain , an homage to Edgar Allan Poe and Thomas Dent M#65533;tter. Lock lives in Aberdeen, New Jersey.
Author Notes
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 State Council on the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Lock's recent works of fiction include the short story collection Love Among the Particles , a Shelf Awareness Best Book of the Year, and three books in The American Novels series: The Boy in His Winter , a reenvisioning of Mark Twain's classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that Scott Simon of NPR's Weekend Edition hailed for "make[ing] Huck and Jim so real you expect to get messages from them on your iPhone"; American Meteor , an homage to Walt Whitman and William Henry Jackson named a Firecracker Award finalist and Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year; and The Port-Wine Stain , a "mesmerizingly twisted, richly layered" ( New York Times Book Review ) homage to Edgar Allan Poe and Thomas Dent M#65533;tter.
Lock lives in Aberdeen, New Jersey, where he is at work on the next books of The American Novels series: A Fugitive in Walden Woods , his homage to Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Wreckage of Eden , his homage to Emily Dickinson, and Feast Day of the Cannibals , his homage to Herman Melville.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Lock's latest novel primarily explores the relationship between the fictional Edward Fenzil and Edgar Allan Poe. The plot, in which Fenzil becomes increasingly unstable under Poe's influence, particularly after being confronted with his corpse doppelgänger, is solid. Some of the stylistic choices, such as the insertion of a lost Poe story and conversations in scripted form between Fenzil and a skull, are also very effective. There are also sections in which an Interlocutor interacts with two characters in blackface, which Lock explains as making use of historical forms. The novel's only problem is the occasional clash between Lock's polished prose style, often dripping with allusions, and the subjects it presents. At times, the dialogue and narration feel too self-consciously literary to make the more visceral sections effective, and the inserted lost story is much more Lock's style than Poe's. Fans of Lock's previous work will likely enjoy this one, but readers primarily interested in Poe may be disappointed.--Keep, Alan Copyright 2016 Booklist
Library Journal Review
In this third in the "American Novels" series (set in 1844 and as polished as its predecessors, The Boy in His Winter and American Meteor), an impressionable young Philadelphian named Edward Fenzil reveres both surgeon Thomas Dent Mütter, a collector of medical oddities, and gothic master Edgar Allan Poe. Increasingly identifying with a murderer whose ghastly skull he has received as a prank, Edward sees himself in Poe's story "The Port-Wine Stain" (down to a presumed stain on his check) and accuses Poe of stealing his life. VERDICT An enthralling and believable picture of the descent into madness, told in chillingly beautiful prose that Poe might envy. © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
