Grim Tales by Norman Lock

In the Dark of This Small Mirror
    an introduction by Matt Bell
    Grim Tales is a book I have always wanted to protect, to keep for myself and myself alone.
    My first reading of Grim Tales was not so long ago nor hard to remember, although the book was then shaped differently, still in its first incarnation as an e-book at the great literary magazine elimae . At the time, I felt like I had been woken up from a dream only to stumble onto a secret body of knowledge, one so important and necessary that immediately I wanted to hoard it, despite knowing that to refuse to share something is eventually to diminish it, to reduce its power in the world.
    It was an obviously ridiculous urge anyway, since I was reading Grim Tales online, but knowing better didn’t stop me from being obsessed or from pretending I was the only one who knew about the book. I printed a copy of the manuscript so that I could carry it around in my bag, slid into the accordion file that contained my then-daily life: my students’ papers, the work of my classmates, and my own frustrating fictions. I would read that printout between classes, or while waiting in public places, knowing that what I was reading was different from what anyone else in the room was holding, maybe from anything else they had ever seen. And so for months, beside all the rest of my life, there lay this weird and restless thing, these Grim Tales , familiar enough to the fairy tales I’d loved to grant me instant access to their world while still remaining uniquely alien, apart, made separate by their containing nothing but that which came from Norman Lock. From the very first page, this was a meticulously ordered world that pretended to randomness even as it made claims of predestination:
    Each morning when he woke, he found that his papers had been worked on during the night. His affairs were being put in order – no matter how he tried to resist it, this “settling of accounts.”
    And so it goes. Nearly every stylistic subtlety contained within the entirety of Grim Tales is included in that opening pair of sentences and from their words issue forth over one-hundred-and-fifty mostly self-contained sections, each one an aggression aimed at the idea that our world is knowable, that its borders are finite, that the relationships we have to the people, places, and artifacts of our days will remain as they are, as we would perhaps like them to be. Here this once-static world is assailed not from without but from within: It is our spouses who are most likely to end our lives, the objects of our houses most likely to avenge us or else take their own revenge, and it is the worst parts of our persons that are likely to define us, to open us up to the judgment of what judges there are left.
    More than most books, Grim Tales lives up to its title, in the near-pun of Grim to Grimm, and in the common meaning of the same word. Which is not to say that Lock is all doom-saying and threatening imagination. He provides a corrective at certain points of the fiction, a light to guide the reader through the dark forest he’s created. This character—a writer or else a series of writers, else perhaps himself—appears several times, including one memorable section near the center of the book, a fulcrum upon which the rest turns:
    He was one who was writing a book of tales. In the middle of his book, he left a note in which he confessed to all things – no matter how wicked or shameless – that were set down in the book, like fiction. In it, he mentioned lightly, as if wanting it to be overlooked, that at the end of his writing of this book he would write another, his last, in which he would disappear forever in a manner to be decided later .
    In this way—and in so many others—Lock changes what we are reading, so that even as the text unsteadies the ground upon which we must live out the rest of our lives, so his tale unsteadies itself, makes what we are reading