“Grim Tales is a mythological catalog of the peculiar, a string of strange, often murderous urban myths. It comes on fast and dirty, micro-moments on micro-moments, each wasting no time in lunging at the throat." —Blake Butler PRAISE “This is book as turbulence disrupting the smooth sea, as anti-matter breaking bonds that had never before been broken. Throughout, the book defies the physics and metaphysics of our known world even as it pretends to a reaching backward, to drawing forth these tales from some shared past, dissembling not to deceive but to aggress us anew. See the quotation marks which suggest some unavailable subtext but which quote nothing but Lock's own imagination, or else that of his arranging characters, his possible narrator, and you see the layers of interpretation he is willing to risk so as to prevent any easy explanation, any trite truth too cleverly left unconcealed. Better always that the work be mysterious, that the mystery be allowed to work upon us." —Matt Bell “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." —Blake Butler
I misplaced this book 10 or so pages from the end, but up to that point IT WAS FANTASTIC.
UPDATE:
My wife found it!
This is a collection of small horrors. One might shelve it with Kosinski's [b:Steps|18464|Steps|Jerzy Kosiński|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1166928514s/18464.jpg|1081162], but the two would only be distant cousins. Mainly shorts, paragraph-length blinks, often of the contents' own terrible endings. I wouldn't call GRIM TALES flash fiction, necessarily, as these seem to crag from each other, but the classification isn't what's important anyway. Norman Lock can write. Here's an excerpt from GRIM TALES. Here's some other Lock. If you just click away from me to Lock, I won't have to convince you to like Lock. So go.
Not only do I emphatically recommend this book, I suggest you spend the $40 to get everything Mud Luscious puts out this year. ( )
“Grim Tales is a mythological catalog of the peculiar, a string of strange, often murderous urban myths. It comes on fast and dirty, micro-moments on micro-moments, each wasting no time in lunging at the throat." —Blake Butler PRAISE “This is book as turbulence disrupting the smooth sea, as anti-matter breaking bonds that had never before been broken. Throughout, the book defies the physics and metaphysics of our known world even as it pretends to a reaching backward, to drawing forth these tales from some shared past, dissembling not to deceive but to aggress us anew. See the quotation marks which suggest some unavailable subtext but which quote nothing but Lock's own imagination, or else that of his arranging characters, his possible narrator, and you see the layers of interpretation he is willing to risk so as to prevent any easy explanation, any trite truth too cleverly left unconcealed. Better always that the work be mysterious, that the mystery be allowed to work upon us." —Matt Bell “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." —Blake Butler
Google Books — Chargement...
(4)
3
UPDATE:
My wife found it!
This is a collection of small horrors. One might shelve it with Kosinski's [b:Steps|18464|Steps|Jerzy Kosiński|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1166928514s/18464.jpg|1081162], but the two would only be distant cousins. Mainly shorts, paragraph-length blinks, often of the contents' own terrible endings. I wouldn't call GRIM TALES flash fiction, necessarily, as these seem to crag from each other, but the classification isn't what's important anyway. Norman Lock can write. Here's an excerpt from GRIM TALES. Here's some other Lock. If you just click away from me to Lock, I won't have to convince you to like Lock. So go.
Not only do I emphatically recommend this book, I suggest you spend the $40 to get everything Mud Luscious puts out this year. (