Grim Tales by Norman Lock Page A

as mutable and transmutable as the events it describes: Is this character the author whose name appears on the cover, or another writer—another Lock—altogether? If the book of tales being written in this section is the one you are holding—if it is Grim Tales , written by Norman Lock—then where is the missing middle section, the one that should fit right where this intimation of its existence fits instead? And what if it is something else, something I cannot imagine or else perhaps refuse to share? How many other interpretations might be possible of this section, of any section of this book, and how many of those might be simultaneously right to different readers, or even correct as contradictions within a single reader, as I feel they are within me?
    This unsteady brand of certainty is one of the most brilliant aspects of Lock’s accomplishment in Grim Tales: 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.
    I could go on, but even now, having just finished reading it for the tenth time in the last two years—ten full times, which doesn’t count when I’ve dipped back in, just for a few pages, just to get a little of its magic all over me all over again—even now I don’t want to give what I know away, and that means not telling you everything I have learned to see in the dark of this small mirror, this wizard’s glass masquerading as mere book. Better that you see it for yourself, that you agree to take its secrets on and let them change you by their keeping. Perhaps you will then feel as I felt: Once I wanted this book all for myself, because it had written its alphabet upon my bones, so that both the shape of me and what that shape contained were made different.
    And yet here we are: Now you too have what I had, and you are at its very beginning. You will turn the page, and the book will say “Each morning when he woke, he found that his papers had been worked on during the night” and it will say “he woke to find in his bed an instrument of destruction” and also “he was drawn from a small to a larger place, in accord with a law of physics yet to be discovered” and then on and on, saying more and more with each small tale. When you are finished you will perhaps be as discomfited as I was, possessed by a good fear, one never before put upon you. Perhaps, like me, you will keep that fear—that grimness—a secret; and few, therefore, will recognize how it has helped to set you apart, even if only in some smallest of ways.
    But all that is after. Between you, as you are now, and that person—a reader set apart—lies these Grim Tales . They begin with the waking from a dream, and so for you the dream ends when you turn this page. The world you’re about to wake into is like no other, and you will be there not nearly as long as you’ll wish you could be, which is not to say that it won’t be long enough to give you everything you need.
    I’ll see you on the other side, back in whatever dream is still left to us, fading as it always is now, and as Lock shows us it always has been. Not to despair: There’s a lot of beauty left in the dream’s dusk, and I look forward to standing with you when you return, ready to gaze