The Port-Wine Stain

Advance Praise for The Port-Wine Stain Library Journal Top Indie Spring Fiction selection An enthralling and believable picture of the descent into madness, told in chillingly beautiful prose that Poe might envy. --Library Journal (starred review) 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 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 [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 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