“Grim Tales is a mythological catalog of the peculiar, a string of strange, often murderous urban myths. It comes on fast and dirty, micro-moments on micro-moments, each wasting no time in lunging at the throat.” —Blake ButlerPRAISE“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.” —Matt Bell“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
