Shadowplay by Norman Lock
ISBN 978-0-9637536-3-2 | Fiction | 138 pages | $13
Also available through Small Press Distribution,
and soon through your local independent bookstore,
Powell’s, Amazon, or Barnes & Noble.
Review on Goodreads.
In Java, a master of the shadow-puppet theater seeks to possess-by his art-a woman, who perishes as though by the contagion of his unnatural desire. Shadowplay is a meditation on story-telling as an act of seizure, a parable of obsession and of the danger of confounding the real with its representations.
Praise for Shadowplay
Stories compensate for lives unlived. They are what Norman Lock, or his avatar Guntur, calls shadows, negative reflections on a backlit screen, comprising, through artistry and brief illumination, ghosts. Lock’s teller is imprisoned by darkness, captivated by warriors and princesses no longer, if ever, living. Death becomes a distance from which the voices of these unliving return. It is a journey as delicious as it is threatening.
—R.M. Berry
In the Dickensian tradition, Lock is adept at writing about places he has never been. He develops exotic lexicons of objects to stage his dramas. Pure objects, the words for them as portrayed in other books & art, unencumbered by the reality of the objects themselves… this is the brilliance of Lock — he mines the unknown or underknown for gems whose value is not relevant to the soil they were dug up from, for no other reason othen than in the name of art.
—Derek White
Lock …evokes a deeply sensual world in which the smell of cinnamon all but sings in the breeze and the sea beckons like a lover… Shadowplay is informed by so many stories… that I initially feared I’d need to haul out my old Bullfinch’s Mythology and a dozen other reference works. But I didn’t. The novel stands on its own and does its tricky work unaided, like the afterlife of a dream.
Praise for Norman Lock
Lock allows us to see the world through an Other’s eyes in such a way that by the end the difference between us…seems little more than a thin sheet of paper, if even that.
—Brian Evenson
Wise up and get all you can of Lock. His writing was written by a writer exquisite in the singularity (read for this “genius”) of his utterance.
—Gordon Lish
[Lock's] prose is melodial, and alert to every signal from the unseen.
—Gary Lutz
All hail Lock, whose narrative soul sings fairy tales, whose language is glass.
—Kate Bernheimer
About Norman Lock
Norman Lock has written novels and short fiction as well as stage, radio and screen plays. He received the 1979 Aga Kahn Prize given by The Paris Review. He is a recipient of a 1999 fellowship from the New Jersey Council on the Arts and a 2009 fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts-both for fiction. His novel The King of Sweden was recently published by Ravenna Press. Norman lives in Philadelphia with his wife, Helen.
More information available at : http://www.normanlock.com/
