Grim Tales

G
RIM
T
ALES

Norman Lock

[ mud luscious press ]

first eBook printing:
2012

cover design :
Steven Seighman

editor :
J. A. Tyler

assoc. editor :
Andrew Borgstrom

acknowledgments :

Individual tales appeared in
3
^rd
bed, 5_trope, elimae, Fairy Tale Review, First Intensity, Full Circle Journal, Kayak, Linnaean Street, New England Review, Paragraph, Seems, Snow Monkey
and
Taint. Grim Tales
, together with
Joseph Cornell's Operas
and
Émigrés
, was published as
Trio
by Triple Press and is available from Ravenna Press. The complete tales are posted as an ebook at
elimae
. The author is grateful to his publishers Kathryn Rantala, Cooper Renner and Deron Bauman, as well as the editors of the above publications, for allowing him to reprint the texts here.

eBook isbn:
978-1-938103-03-2

l c c n :
2010916969

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 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 ever more truly upon what world remains.

Matt Bell
is the author of the fiction collection
How They Were Found
, and the editor of
The Collagist
.

F
OR
M
AXWELL
& M
ALCOLM

… MERELY CURVING A MIRROR'S SURFACE CAN PLUNGE A MAN INTO AN IMAGINED WORLD …

Umberto Eco

G
RIM
T
ALES

Norman Lock

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.” No matter that, in desperation one night, he burnt the papers, including his last will and testament, which was now being written in a hand he did not recognize, leaving everything to his estranged wife, a woman whom he despised. Last night, having resigned himself, he took an overdose of sleeping pills, sufficient to stop his heart.

The pebbles grew into stones, the stones into great rocks. The rocks reared up into mountains, which cast their shadows over the land – their cold shadows. Darkness fell on the fields and the town and on a woman pinning sheets onto the line, her mouth full of clothespins and her breasts taut and lifted against her blouse. When her husband looked out the window and saw her, desire rose up in him. When she came into the house, he laid her down on the unmade bed and covered her body with his own just as the first boulders broke loose from the mountains and the avalanches began.

The cloud, which looked, they said, ominous – a roiling darkness minutely veined with fire – rolled over the city and, after a time, settled on a part of it “like a cupped hand.” No light could pierce it: not the light from the streetlamps or from the house windows. Those who walked inside the darkness wondered at it – how it clung to them, their clothes and hands. When it lifted the following day, that part of the city where it had been was as if erased.