Grim Tales: A Novel(la)

"Norman Lock’s GRIM TALES is a mythological catalog of the peculiar, a string of strange, often murderous urban myths. It comes on fast and dirty, wasting no time in lunging at your throat…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, from The Believer