Publisher Description

"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 Mütter, 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 doppelgänger, 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 Mütter. Lock lives in Aberdeen, New Jersey.

Author Biography

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 Mutter. 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.

Review

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

Promotional

Co-op availableSignificant bound galley printing for media and booksellers. Additional eGalley distribution to media, booksellers, and librarians through EdelweissNational print, public radio, and online campaigns, targeting coverage on nationally broadcast public radio programs; major daily newspapers; popular and men's magazines; and speculative fiction and literary journals, websites, and blogs. We will also seek special coverage in Father's Day, Summer Reading, and Halloween feature storiesReading group guide development and book club outreachSimultaneous eBook publication and promotionPostcards availableGiveaways through Goodreads and LibraryThingPromotion through the author's website and BLP's social media networks and website Marketing and publicity efforts supported by Molly Mikolowski of A Literary Light

Long Description

"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

Review Quote

Select Praise for Norman Lock''s The American Novels Series "Shimmers with glorious language, fluid rhythms, and complex insights." -- NPR "Our national history and literature are Norman Lock''s playground in his dazzling series, The American Novels. . . . [His] supple, elegantly plain-spoken prose captures the generosity of the American spirit in addition to its moral failures, and his passionate engagement with our literary heritage evinces pride in its unique character." -- Washington Post "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 . . . to create something entirely new--an American fable of ideas." -- Shelf Awareness On The Boy in His Winter "Brilliant. . . . The Boy in His Winter is a glorious meditation on justice, truth, loyalty, story, and the alchemical effects of love, a reminder of our capacity to be changed by the continuously evolving world ''when it strikes fire against the mind''s flint,'' and by profoundly moving novels like this." -- NPR On American Meteor "[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 On The Port-Wine Stain "Lock''s novel engages not merely with [Edgar Allan Poe and Thomas Dent M

Competing Titles

This House is Haunted John Boyne 9781590516799 14.95 Other Press 2013 Hyde Danielle Levine 9780544191181 24 Houghton Mifflin 2014 Rustication: A Novel Charles Palliser 9780393088724 25.95 WW Norton 2013 Pym: A Novel Mat Johnson 9780812981582 24 Random House/Spiegel & Grau 2011 Dr. M

Description for Sales People

Set in nineteenth-century Philadelphia, The Port-Wine Stain features a cast of famous figures--all geniuses and innovators in their own fields, some of whom were considered morbidly distasteful in their time--including author Edgar Allan Poe, surgeon Thomas Dent M

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