May 20, 2013
In his newest collection, surrealist storyteller Lock (Pieces for Small Orchestra & Other Fictions) ob-sesses over the dreamscape of the past, composing stories that are enticingly and enigmatically rele-vant for the present. Lock focuses on where the popular lore and the technological anxieties of the Gilded Age interweave: Edward Hyde's voice recorded on Edison's phonograph, the Mummy invited to California to oversee the technical details of a horror movie, a steward lost on ship laying the trans-atlantic cable. For a reader in the digital age, these moments may seem familiar: a crowd cheering the appearance of the director of railroads parallels our own pop culture adoration for pioneers in mobile technology. Although by the end Lock catches up to the 21st century, the majority of this collection seems an experiment to help him come to terms with the digital age, a motif he confronts in the final three narratives. Regardless of motive, these humorous, imaginative meditations on the nature of dreams, time, and space shimmer in their own darkness. There is some danger in Lock's prose as it nears ponderousness in its extreme patience, but reminiscent of the plays of Samuel Beckett, there is a wealth of insight here.
May 15, 2013
A strange and engaging collection of short stories. In "The Monster in Winter," a writer gets the notion to take "notorious murderer" Edward Hyde, of Jekyll and Hyde infamy, on tour. The plan is for Hyde to talk of and perhaps re-enact some of his horrible deeds. "The Mummy's Bitter and Melancholy Exile" opens with a mummy being invited to speak on the radio in 1934, a long way from the stone deathbed in Egypt that is his comfort zone. Lock's stories stir time as though it were a soup where any of the ingredients might contact any other. Do time and space even matter? A train's brakeman has no idea where his train is going or if it will go on forever. Another train briefly appears alongside, carrying seemingly contented commuters from another dimension; soon, it turns away and disappears into the horizon. An ordinary middle-age man is transformed into a collection of sentient atoms, muons, leptons and the like. He can merge with other bodies, read other minds. He can climb onto a computer's motherboard and ride an electronic rail into the vast Internet and back again, since this is the digital age, and he is all data. Each of the 16 stories has a similar feel, even those in which the narrator has not literally gone to pieces. They are gems, rich in imagination and language. Readers will happily suspend disbelief, perhaps even finding particles of humor with the Museum of Steam's bottled steam that "rose, unbidden...with indecent intent with regard to a woman's knickers." And beyond the entertainment lie 21st-century conundrums: What really exists? Are we each, ultimately, alone and lonely? Where is technology taking humankind? For all their convolutions of space and time, these stories are remarkably easy to follow and savor.
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