The Port-Wine Stain (The American Novels) - Softcover

Praise for The Port-Wine Stain Library Journal "Top Indie Spring Fiction" selection Vol. 1 Brooklyn "Year of Favorites" selection "Lock's novel engages not merely with [Edgar Allan Poe and Thomas Dent Mutter] but with decadent fin de siecle 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 "Lock deftly evokes time and place in The Port-Wine Stain, avoiding the pitfalls of historical fiction as a genre. His novel is wrapped in the art, science, and culture of mid-nineteenth-century Philadelphia but truly captivates in the storytelling." --Fine Books Magazine "The Port-Wine Stain is quite simply beautifully worded and would appeal to the average reader or an aficionado of Poe's particular brand of deliciously expressed horror." --MedHum Fiction | Daily Dose: Adventures at the Intersection of Medicine and Literature "An enthralling and believable picture of the descent into madness, told in chillingly beautiful prose that Poe might envy." --Library Journal (starred review) "Powerfully complex... The Port-Wine Stain fits perfectly with the previous two [American Novels books]: The Boy in His Winter and American Meteor. By picking a moment in U.S. history and inhabiting it with the real-life characters that defined the age, Lock allows his readers to explore the development of national identity." --Shelf Awareness for Readers "As lyrical and alluring as Poe's own original work, The Port-Wine Stain captures the magic, mystery, and madness of the great American author while weaving an eerie and original tale in homage to him." --Foreword Reviews "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." --Kirkus Reviews "[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." --Publishers Weekly "Solid... Effective." --Booklist "Engrossing." --Historical Novels Review "Shivery-good." --Small Press Book Review Praise for Norman Lock & the American Novels series "[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 "Sheds brilliant light along the meteoric path of American westward expansion... [A] pithy, compact beautifully conducted version of the American Dream." --ALAN CHEUSE, NPR on American Meteor "Make[s] Huck and Jim so real you expect to get messages from them on your iPhone." --SCOTT SIMON, NPR Weekend Edition on The Boy in His Winter "[Lock's fiction] shimmers with glorious language, fluid rhythms, and complex insights." --JANE CIABATTARI, NPR "One of the most interesting writers out there." --Reader's Digest "A master of the unusual." -- Slice magazine "One could spend forever worming through [Lock's] magicked words, their worlds." --Believer "[Lock's writing] lives up to Whitman's words ... no other writer, in recent memory, dares the reader to believe there is a hand reaching out to be held, a hand to hold onto us." --Detroit Metro Times "Lock is a rapturous storyteller, and his tales are never less than engrossing." --Kenyon Review "One of our country's unsung treasures." --Green Mountains Review "Our finest modern fabulist." --Bookslut "A master storyteller." --Largehearted Boy "[A] contemporary master of the form [and] virtuosic fabulist." --Flavorwire "[Lock's] window onto fiction [is] a welcome one: at once referential and playful, occupying a similar post-Borges space to ... Stephen Millhauser and Neil Gaiman." --Vol. 1 Brooklyn "[Lock] is not engaged in either homage or pastiche but in an intense dialogue with a number of past writers about the process of writing, and the nature of fiction itself." --Weird Fiction "Lock's work mines the stuff of dreams." --Rumpus "You can feel the joy leaping off the page." --Full Stop "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." --Shelf Awareness "Lock plays profound tricks, with language--his is crystalline and underline-worthy." --Publishers Weekly "[Lock] writes beautifully, with many subtle, complex insights." --Booklist "[Lock] successfully blends beautiful language reminiscent of 19th-century prose with cynicism and bald, ugly truth." --Library Journal "Lock's stories stir time as though it were a soup ... beyond the entertainment lie 21st-century conundrums: What really exists? Are we each, ultimately, alone and lonely? Where is technology taking humankind?" --Kirkus Reviews "All hail Lock, whose narrative soul sings fairy tales, whose language is glass." --KATE BERNHEIMER, editor of xo Orpheus: Fifty New Myths, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me, and Fairy Tale Review "[Lock] has an impressive ability to create a unique and original world." --BRIAN EVENSON, author of Immobility and A Collapse of Horses "Lock is one of our great miniaturists, to be read only a single time at one's peril." --TIM HORVATH, author of Understories

"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 Mutter, 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 doppelganger, 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 Mutter. Lock lives in Aberdeen, New Jersey.