The Port-Wine Stain

By Norman Lock

A young surgical assistant faces his doppelgänger in a chilling tale featuring Edgar Allan Poe and a “lost” Poe story.

In his third stand-alone book of The American Novels series, Norman Lock recounts the story of a young Philadelphian, Edward Fenzil, who, in the winter of 1844, falls under the sway of two luminaries of the nineteenth-century grotesque imagination: Thomas Dent Mütter, a surgeon and collector of medical “curiosities,” and Edgar Allan Poe. As Fenzil struggles against the powerful wills that would usurp his identity, including that of his own malevolent doppelgänger, he loses his mind and his story to another.

The Port-Wine Stain is a gothic psychological thriller whose themes are possession, identity, and storytelling that the master, Edgar Allan Poe, might have been proud to call his own.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press
• Release date: May 16, 2016
• ISBN: 9781942658078

Book preview

PRAISE FOR NORMAN LOCK

[Norman Lock’s fiction] shimmers with glorious language, fluid rhythms, and complex insights. —NPR

One could spend forever worming through [Lock’s] magicked words, their worlds. —The Believer

[Lock’s writing] lives up to Whitman’s words . . . no other writer, in recent memory, dares the reader to believe there is a hand reaching out to be held, a hand to hold onto us. —Detroit Metro Times

Lock is a rapturous storyteller, and his tales are never less than engrossing. —Kenyon Review

One of our country’s unsung treasures. —Green Mountains Review

Our finest modern fabulist. —Bookslut

A master storyteller. —Largehearted Boy

[A] contemporary master of the form [and] virtuosic fabulist. —Flavorwire

[Lock’s] window onto fiction [is] a welcome one: at once referential and playful, occupying a similar post-Borges space to . . . Stephen Millhauser and Neil Gaiman. —Vol. 1 Brooklyn

[Lock] is not engaged in either homage or pastiche but in an intense dialogue with a number of past writers about the process of writing, and the nature of fiction itself. —Weird Fiction

Lock’s work mines the stuff of dreams. —Rumpus

You can feel the joy leaping off the page. —Full Stop

Lock plays profound tricks, with language—his is crystalline and underline-worthy. —Publishers Weekly

[Lock] writes beautifully, with many subtle, complex insights. —Booklist

[Lock] successfully blends beautiful language reminiscent of 19th-century prose with cynicism and bald, ugly truth. —Library Journal

Lock writes some of the most deceptively beautiful sentences in contemporary fiction. Beneath their clarity are layers of cultural and literary references, profound questions about loyalty, race, the possibility of social progress, and the nature of truth. —Shelf Awareness

Lock’s stories stir time as though it were a soup . . . beyond the entertainment lie 21st-century conundrums: What really exists? Are we each, ultimately, alone and lonely? Where is technology taking humankind? —Kirkus Reviews

All hail Lock, whose narrative soul sings fairy tales, whose language is glass. —Kate Bernheimer, editor of xo Orpheus: Fifty New Myths, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me, and Fairy Tale Review

[Lock] has an impressive ability to create a unique and original world. —Brian Evenson, author of Immobility and A Collapse of Horses

Lock is one of our great miniaturists, to be read only a single time at one’s peril. —Tim Horvath, author of Understories

A writer exquisite in the singularity (read for this ‘genius’) of his utterance. —Gordon Lish

OTHER BOOKS IN THE AMERICAN NOVELS SERIES

American Meteor

The Boy in His Winter

ALSO BY NORMAN LOCK

Love Among the Particles (stories)

First published in the United States in 2016 by Bellevue Literary Press, New York

For information, contact:

Bellevue Literary Press

NYU School of Medicine

550 First Avenue

OBV A612

New York, NY 10016

© 2016 by Norman Lock

This is a work of fiction. Characters, organizations, events, and places (even those that are actual) are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lock, Norman, 1950–

The port-wine stain: with an unfinished tale by Edgar A. Poe / by >Norman Lock.—

First edition.

pages; cm

I. Title.

PS3562.O218P67

2016

813’.54—dc23

2015030706

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a print, online, or broadcast review.

Bellevue Literary Press would like to thank all its generous donors—individuals and foundations—for their support.

The New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature

This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Book design and composition by Mulberry Tree Press, Inc.

First Edition

135798642

ebook ISBN: 978-1-942658-07-8

For Edward Renn,

Doppelgänger and Friend

Contents

PART ONE

PART TWO

The Port-Wine Stain

Acknowledgments

About the Author

True!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous

I had been and am; but why will you say that

I am mad? The disease had sharpened my

senses—not destroyed—not dulled them.

—The Tell-Tale Heart, Edgar Allan Poe

PART ONE

. . . I have been, in some measure, the slave of circumstances beyond human control.

—William Wilson, E. A. Poe

Camden, New Jersey, April 22, 1876

THOMAS EAKINS’S PAINTING, accounted famous by those who can appreciate it, of Dr. Gross’s clinic at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia has always given me the horrors. Not the reeking hands of the surgeons nor the raw ensanguined flesh exposed on the young boy’s thigh disturbs me—by 1875, I was inured to gory scenes, having served in the Union army medical corps during the War of Secession—no, it’s not the blood, but the general murk above the harshly lit operating theater where the students sit, in attitudes of boredom or indifference, observing the removal of the diseased portion of the boy’s femur, that makes me anxious. To gaze at them, at the death masks of faces rendered brutal by smears of paint, calls up in me a sensation of dread, as if I were straining to raise something repellent from the lightless depths of memory—a thing too blighted for the light of day, belonging to nightmares or to one of Poe’s ghastly tales. That the man sitting in the third row, at the far left side of the painting, is, in fact, me makes matters worse. I shiver to see myself depicted in that grim scene like a callow student during his first amputation.

I knew Poe, in Philadelphia. Some thirty years ago, we were often in each other’s company. I was not much more than a boy. . . .

Eakins made me look ten years younger than the fifty I was—not to satisfy any vanity of my own (I have none), but to ensure that I wouldn’t stand out among the young men in the gallery. In the painting, which is a large one, the hair and mustache are as you see them now, only not so grizzled, and, as you can also plainly see, my posture is poor; it belongs to a man who has carried his share of burdens, or labored under more than his share of delusions. I never did carry myself well, not even when I was a young man at large in the streets of Philadelphia, eager to make something of myself.

Have you seen the painting, Moran?

No? Well, if you have the stomach for it, which a man like you must, it’s hanging in the Army Post Hospital nearby the centenary exhibition. The selection committee—backbiting gentlemen artists, most of them—consigned it to that quarantine rather than the public galleries, so as not to offend the lady visitors by its frankness. As I said, I’ve reasons of my own to dislike the painting, but something compels me to look at it. I’ve stood in front of that appalling canvas half a dozen times already. I’m drawn to peer into the gloom of its recesses—secret recesses, I would almost say—and wonder.

At what?

I don’t know, precisely. That’s the wonder of it. Oh, let’s say—to say something—that I’m enthralled by what’s there . . . or isn’t. I—I hate the bloody thing and, at the same time, am fascinated by it. It appalls me, Moran; it scares the living daylights out of me. I mentioned the strange effect his painting has on me to Eakins. I wanted to know—in my bafflement, I almost shouted at him inside the Philadelphia Club’s card room. I had to know what he meant by that noxious gloom, that mud of color—too damned drab to be called color!—in which he’d posed me with my chin on my cravat, my eye sockets black and empty, as though pecked clean by ravens. The young men ranged about me fare no better. We’re, all of us, enveloped in a miasma as septic, to my mind, as the poor wretch’s thighbone. The operation, by the way, had not been staged for the painting; the boy and his wound were real. I tell you, Moran, the scene was a perfect horror! No wonder the boy’s mother, sitting in her black dress near the great god of the scalpel, Gross, hid her head in her arm. I can’t look at the thing without shuddering.

But you don’t want to hear about my hysteria—unbecoming to a medical man—or about Eakins’s painting, great as it undoubtedly is. You want to hear about Edgar Poe, how I came to know him and how he initiated me into the occult.

Yes, Moran, I said occult. Poe ushered me, as it were, to the iron door of the tomb and bid me knock. He showed me a world, ashen and forlorn, seen by greasy torchlight. He taught me the true meaning of self-effacement, the loss of one’s own being in another’s dream—one so vivid that it threatened the balance of my reason. His morbid curiosity, piqued by the insistence of his art, caused me to doubt my own existence. Poe, Eakins—from what I know of artists, they are an unscrupulous lot. They’ll do whatever’s necessary to lay open the abscesses of——

Do you believe in a soul, Moran? I do, although not as Christians do, or heathens, either, for all I know of them. I believe in the soul as it might be an organ of the body whose function is to persist beyond the body’s natural span, to gain for the body a kind of fame or infamy, which is an afterlife, of sorts. As in the case of any organ, the soul can become diseased. While I knew him, he made me see—Poe did; made me understand that, unlike a bodily organ, the soul desires, even wills, its own continuance. It can be said to be the seat of will and desire and, in its necrotic state, the root of evil. Evil is real, Moran. I know it. A Sunday school lesson or one of Cotton Mather’s gaudy rants that helped to kindle the Salem bonfires is nearer to the truth of it than a fable by Poe, Hawthorne, or Melville. Evil’s a malignancy beyond the skill and scalpel of even Dr. Gross to heal or extirpate. Words are as powerless against it as a witch doctor’s incantation. And yet we heed them—thrill to them—glory in their ardent particles and claim enlightenment. What’s Ahab and his white whale beside the slaughter of the buffalo, The Last of the Mohicans beside the Cherokees’ Trail of Tears, the Inquisition of The Pit and the Pendulum beside the lynching of a negro or the burning of a witch? A symbol is no more than a clean bandage on an ugly cut, and yet we live by them and only sometimes do we realize their falsity. A story—a hook, a barb, each word a knot—it captures us; it captured me. A young man, I became enmeshed in one by Edgar Poe.

Strange how a vile thing can seduce our minds as well as our lower natures. The caricaturists misunderstand evil, for, more often than not, it has a pleasing face, or at least an ordinary one. Corruption is seldom visible on the faces of the living. If seen at all, it is like a ragged petticoat trailing below a fancy skirt or the painted face of a hag or whore concealing the pox. Devils do not bear the outward sign of the Beast, but wear its token like a Masonic ring. If only sin were ugly, we might be rid of it like Ireland was of its tattooed snakes.

Perhaps part of my fascination for Eakins’s painting is how—perhaps unwittingly—he has laid bare the base character of a number of those men of medicine, for the most part inattentive, if not asleep, sitting slumped in the gloom above the mortal struggle being waged on the operating table. In many of their faces, I see, or think I see, brutishness—even brutality—in the slashes of paint. I’ve studied my own in that painting and seem to see something my shaving mirror does not give back to me—something coarse and unnerving. To read one of Poe’s tales or poems is to experience a like disturbance of the mind—almost a revolt against one’s own better angels. No, I dislike the products of Poe’s lurid imagination even more than I do Eakins’s picture. Better to spend an hour with Walt Whitman’s pages: The sentiments one finds there are so very frank and wholesome. There’s something almost childlike about him. Didn’t you find him so?

Are you an admirer of his verses, Moran?

I thought you must be. My name’s Fenzil, by the way. Edward Fenzil. I’ve been calling on Whitman ever since Dr. McAlister, who ordinarily attends him, came down with influenza. My office is just along Stevens Street, at Broadway. Whitman bears his infirmity bravely, as you might have expected from reading his Leaves. To be honest, I much prefer a poem that gallops, with a rhyme to chime the end of each stretch, like Poe’s The Raven. But I’m keeping you, Moran. You have the ferry to catch if you’re to visit the Philadelphia exposition. Unless you’ve time to have your curiosity satisfied . . .

You are curious, aren’t you? It was curiosity made me linger outside Whitman’s house when you went inside. Forgive me, but it’s the habit of a medical man, although it began in me before I ever thought of medicine as a profession. It was Poe who awoke in me a morbid interest in things that lie far from my own little fulcrum of influence—at least he sharpened it. So if you care to hear me out, come along to my rooms and I’ll tell you a tale, with a whiskey or two to take off its chill—the same that I told to Whitman during one of Eakins’s visits.

Coming?

Good! I get desperate sometimes for company.

They’re friends, you know, Whitman and Eakins. My tale made an impression on them both—especially on Eakins. Afterward, he invited me to pose as one of the medical students in Gross’s clinic. He said I’d lend his picture gravity, although I can’t see it myself.

I sometimes think he hoped to fix me in paint, to make me a captive of a world not my own but—well, I can’t say whose. Not his, surely, not Eakins’s, except as any artist does in pigments, clay, or words. Of the three, I mistrust words most of all. Eakins is a remarkable man. He’s using Muybridge’s photographic motion studies to see what cannot be seen by the eye, the better to paint life, which is rarely still. The fact remains that whenever I gaze at The Clinic of Dr. Gross, I feel oppressed, as though I’ve been translated into a form of dull and inert matter. As if I’d become ossified. The only one sitting in that dirty brume whose face shows animation—whose eyes are open and aware—is Eakins. He inserted himself into his painting: He’s sitting in the first row, next to the man wearing a frock coat and wing collar, with an unruly blond mustache and glazed expression. This man, the jaded one, stands in the mouth of the tunnel leading to the operating theater while Eakins leans forward, his interest piqued, his gaze intense, even cold. His hand holds a pencil, with which he’s sketching the bloody scene.

Damn this wind! My pipe’s gone out. Well, we’re almost there.

Eakins’s picture? Monstrous thing.

There’s something, too, about the tunnel he painted below the gallery: It seems lit by a distant fire whose source lies elsewhere than the world of actuality that Eakins is said to have depicted with such exactitude. One would almost call the quality of that light infernal, if this weren’t 1876, in an age of science and reason. See for yourself if I’m not right. You’ll be sure to view the painting, won’t you, Moran? It’s curious and, I think, worth the time and small effort to take it in. It seems an illustration for a story Poe might’ve written. Perhaps he did write it, and it’s been lost. There is another. . . . He died believing I’d destroyed it. I meant to, but I couldn’t bring myself to burn it on the grate.

I said that I have the sensation of being in thrall to something or someone whenever I look at myself in Eakins’s painting. I think it’s Poe; his influence on me has persisted all this long while since we were so often together in Philadelphia during the winter of 1844 and, once that winter, in Providence, when we visited—strange to say—another Whitman: Sarah Whitman, no relation to the Good Gray Poet. A Transcendentalist and

Reviews for The Port-Wine Stain

[erikschreppel · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I am a huge fan of both Edgar Allan Poe and Thomas Mutter. So when reading the description of The Port Wine Stain I was very excited to dive into this book. Unfortunately I was ultimately disappointed. I felt none of the wonderful eeriness that I get when I read Poe, the plot didn’t drive anything forward and honestly it felt like nothing really happened. One of Poe’s great talents to me is his ability to make the mundane seem creepy and thereby holding my attention while he builds to the ultimate fate of the characters. Norman Lock’s book had none of that, it was just simply mundane reading.

[heathn-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Received as an Early Reviewer copy.Based upon the blurb, I was looking forward to reading this one. I like Poe's work, and noirish/horror things in general. My understanding is that Lock is writing a series of novels that are heavily influenced by a past author's style. With this one, he has chosen Poe, and while I think he has made a good effort, it never seemed to gel together.The story jumps between two separate time periods, the present day of 1876, and the past of 1844. The protagonist, Edward Fenzil, is telling another man, Moran, about the few months that he met and spent time with Edgar Allan Poe. The majority is then set during flashbacks of 1844. The present day sections felt very off to me, as there is a conversation happening, yet Moran has no dialogue in the book. All we know are how Fenzil answers the questions posed to Moran. The bulk though is set during the 1844 flashbacks, and Fenzil's time spent with Poe. Fenzil it interested in the bizarre, and is drawn to Poe's character. The title, The Port-Wine Stain, refers to an unpublished short story, that Fenzil reads, and how this story pushes him into slowly losing his mind.In all, I wasn't a very big fan, and would recommend if you are looking for a Poe type story, then to actually read one of Poe's.

[paradoxosalpha · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I have read perhaps a half-dozen stories and novels in which the writer H.P. Lovecraft features as a character. None of them, however, actually felt like a story that Lovecraft might have written. In Norman Lock's The Port-Wine Stain, it is Lovecraft's predecessor in American horror, Edgar Allan Poe, who is a principal character. But this one has the constitution and many of the trappings of an actual Poe tale. The cover of my ARC, which appears to be retained in the trade paperback edition, is based on the Thomas Richard Williams daguerreotype stereoscope image "The Sands of Time." It's attractive, and certainly suits the mood of the book. But I think the cover designer could have gone one better by exploiting some detail from the Thomas Eakins painting of The Gross Clinic, which is used in the outermost frame of the novel to draw the reader into an imagining of 19th-century American medicine as a site of horror. The novel is constructed in the form of a reminiscing monologue by Doctor Edward Fenzil, who had in his youth been under the dual influences of Poe and the medical researcher Thomas Dent Mütter. The reader is addressed in the person of "Moran," a one-eyed soldier serving under General Custer in 1876, but Fenzil's story centers on the winter of early 1844. It is a narrative that he claims to have never before confessed in its entirety, and certainly one that does not cast a favorable light on the storyteller. Theorist Massimo Cacciari writes of Poe's stories, "In an analytical manner, passage by passage, without leaps, without discoveries, madness--by recovering its past and coordinating it with the present and planning a series of specific resolutions--reveals its own logic." This same appraisal might be made of The Port-Wine Stain. The book is short, with the pacing of Part One being fairly sedate, while Part Two is comparatively brisk. It includes in its metafictional array the full text of an unfinished story "by Poe" called "The Port-Wine Stain," and it is ultimately the links between this story and the experiences of the young Fenzil that constitute the logic of madness in Lock's novel.If you like Poe's work, this book is worth seeking out.

[brieanne.allen · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I was so torn about this book, but in the end I was disappointed.I didn't come into the text with any clear agenda - just a fiction read that would take me away from reality. I couldn't finish it. It was difficult to get started in the text. I felt I jumped into a conversation already started and had difficulty catching up. At the same time, I was eagerly awaiting the plot to progress forward; however, I just couldn't get into it. Whenever I have that feeling, I endeavor to read to page 100 and give it a true try; however, I couldn't this time. I couldn't get into the thread that continues the book along - page after page. After deciding to stop, I quickly read through the rest of the book to see if it got better and I was disappointed.Not the book for me.

[maryintexas39 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I have mixed emotions about "The Port-Wine Stain." I typically love Victorian fiction, stories set in that time frame, etc., so I thought this would be very appealing to me. I found it difficult to get into, and I couldn't seem to bond with the main character, Edward Fenzil. Basically it is a story of him subcoming to sadness after meeting and befriending Edgar Allan Poe.The prose is excellent. The story just didn't grab me.

[fuzzy_patters · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I liked this book, but I didn't like it quite as much as other books by Lock. It's written in the style of Edgar Allen Poe and the protagonist is a doctor who is living in the 1880s and telling about times that he spent with Poe when Poe was still alive. It is an entertaining send-up of Poe, but it isn't as thought provoking as some of Lock's other works.

[staceyn-2 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Thanks to LibraryThing, I won an uncorrected proof copy of this book to read and review. This book was excellent! It was a well researched and written work of literature. In 1876 New Jersey, Edward Fenzil relates the time in 1844 Philadelphia when he maintained a brief friendship with Edgar Allen Poe. Fenzil was still a teen at the time and very impressionable. Poe introduced Fenzil to many dark and disturbing ideas and people, including a dead doppelgänger , which lead him down a frightening path towards insanity. I was also very impressed with author Norman Lock's writing style from that time period which greatly added to the believability.

[datrappert · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Philadelphia, 1844. A young man working with Dr. Thomas Mutter and charged to manage his museum of medical curiosities, is introduced to Edgar Allan Poe, who has a malign influence on him. While the author paints a vivid picture of Philadelphia, the reader keeps waiting and waiting for something to happen that justifies the narrator's (a much older version of the young man) fascination with his own story. It is told, in 1876, after the young man has become a doctor and suffered through the Civil War, to another doctor he meets on Walt Whitman's doorstep. The telling goes on for two days, but despite the author's attempt to put us into a mood of horror at the things Poe put the young man through, it just doesn't work. Some of the episodes are interesting, but the author fails to get inside any of the characters other than the narrator. Lock has apparently read the recent biography of Mutter--another book I received and reviewed through LibraryThing--but the depth of the man is severely lacking in this story. As for Poe, he is presented as a compendium of the subjects of his own stories--a fascination with death of all sorts and of whatever vice is handiest. Lock fails most when he attempts to write a "lost" Poe story--one Poe wrote with the young man in mind that the young man steals because it hits too close to home. The story tries to recreate Poe by the use of various quotations and some pseudo-scientific language. But it, like this whole book, fails to really capture the indescribable essence at the heart of Poe's horror.If you are a fan of Poe, you may enjoy the many times when Lock overtly or obliquely references aspects of Poe's stories--or foreshadows Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge"--but in the end, you'll just be glad that Lock at least kept it short at 217 pages. Much more would have just added to the mild tedium reading The Port-Wine Stain produces.

[bcquinnsmom · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Thanks, LT and thank you, Bellevue Literary Press, for my copy.I have to say that despite the low ratings being given to this book, I was pleasantly surprised at that little shiver that went up my spine as I turned the last page of this novel to an ending I was not at all expecting. I think it's a fine example of dark fiction, what I call a "slow burner" -- a story where the reader starts getting the sense that something is not quite right, a bit off-kilter, if you will, but can't quite put his or her finger on whatever it is that causes this feeling. I love books and short stories that can do this and do it well, and it's done well here. To me, this book reflects exactly what it is when I look for while reading in the dark zone: at what point does someone reach their breaking point, and what factors combine to bring someone to the edge of that abyss? In that sense, then, the story belongs to the main character, Edward Fenzil, and not so much to Poe, so if you're expecting a channeling of Poe here, don't go there. I am also quite fascinated with the notions of the doppelganger and the self as other, and the author has done a really good job exploring both of those ideas. Patient, slow and careful readers will understand what I mean here.To be very blunt, I know that a lot of people do the "if I'm not in love with it up through the first 50 pages" sort of thing (not me -- I learned from experience that some of the best books start out slowly) and this book is really hard to love within those parameters. It starts out very slowly, and my guess is that for most readers, it would have behooved the author to get something punchy in there quickly. Another thing -- the language used in this novel may bother some people, since it does tend to get a bit cumbersome, but on the other hand, I'm very much used to this style, since I'm someone who loves and reads tons of 19th-century fiction, so it didn't bother me at all. Frankly, I found the story fascinating, and I think serious readers of dark fiction will enjoy this novel. I certainly did.

[goth_marionette · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I was excited for this book as I love Poe's work and life story. Unfortunately for me this we not written in a style that I enjoy. I thought the author did a nice job with character descriptions and plot (yes it was a bit slow but was good in the end). It was written as if you are listening to a conversation of a man telling of one memorable time in his past. I have never been a fan of first person narration. I feel that people are going to either love the book or put it down in the beginning.

[richardderus · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The Publisher Says: In his third book of The American Novels series, Norman Lock recounts the story of a young Philadelphian, Edward Fenzil, who, in the winter of 1844, falls under the sway of two luminaries of the nineteenth-century grotesque imagination: Thomas Dent Mütter, a surgeon and collector of medical “curiosities,” and Edgar Allan Poe. As Fenzil struggles against the powerful wills that would usurp his identity, including that of his own malevolent doppelgänger, he loses his mind and his story to another.My Review: I’ve read other reviews in the book-blogosphere that were, shall we say, indicative of a certain disappointment in the blogger’s experience reading The Port-Wine Stain. I am not among these bloggers. I liked the book. In fact, I liked it the best of The American Novels cycle that Bellevue Literary Press will be publishing through 2018. I asked their publicist for all of them published so far, since I was that curious about Lock’s aims. When they arrived (thanks again!), I started from book 1, The Boy in His Winter, which wasn’t a favorite of mine; American Meteor, second in the cycle, which definitely was a favorite of mine; so now, by book three, I think I might have absorbed a sense of purpose and a trust in Lock’s craftsmanship and artistry that others might not have the advantage of possessing.Or maybe I just have really good taste. This book was shivery-good.He knocked absurdly on the skull like a man impatient for a door to open. His eyes glazed over. He appeared to be in the grasp of something beyond the reach of ordinary mortals.“Time is slowing,” he said in a leaden voice. “Each moment grows and fattens like a drop of rain on a window sash, waiting to fall.”That’s Poe upon visiting our invented narrator, Mr. Edward Fenzil, aged nineteen and of ignoble stock, who has been gifted with a leg-up in the world by becoming bone-keeper in Dr. Thomas Dent Mütter’s medical school. Does it feel over-the-top to you? Then forevermore don’t read Poe himself! As Edward dusts skulls, Dr. Mütter gives him what amount to private lectures. It was required that he clean the operating theater after surgeries, but he was also always within reach of the great man, could pose questions, and assist the doctor with his researches on different scientific subjects.Dr. Mütter also encourages a closeness between Edward and Edgar, saying the friendship will benefit Edward by allowing him to observe closely the workings of “the pathological mind.” But in any meddling mentor’s files there are innumerable cases like this, where the intent and the result are at opposite poles. Edgar is a man of the world, a gentleman, and overawes young Edward. It wouldn’t have been difficult, considering Edward’s youth and (in the time period) it wouldn’t be any surprise for a lower-class lad to be unfamiliar with any gentility or mannerliness.Poe’s proffered friendship has a profound impact on Edward in so many ways. As Edgar introduces Edward to every strange corner of the city of Philadelphia, he (deliberately?) changes the young man forever:While I knew him, he made me see—Poe did; made me understand that, unlike a bodily organ, the soul desires, even wills, its own continuance. It can be said to be the seat of will and desire and, even in its necrotic state, the root of evil. ... A Sunday school lesson or one of Cotton Mather's gaudy rants that helped to kindle the Salem bonfires is nearer to the truth of it than a fable by Poe, Hawthorne, or Melville. Evil's a malignancy beyond the skill and scalpel of {doctors} to heal or extirpate.I’m in sympathy with this view, and would be converted to it after learning one of Poe’s lessons for Edward. In order to become a member of Poe’s Thanatopsis Society, Edward is subjected to an appalling initiation ritual involving the young man proving he is worthy of ritual transformation into a death god. Needless to say, Edward is traumatized by the nature of the initiation. So was I when I read it. The tone of the novel becomes decidedly darker after this event, matching the mental agitation of the narrator telling his story some thirty-five years and the Civil War between him and it.No, I’m not going to reveal the ritual. Suffice it to say that anyone familiar with Poe’s stories will recognize it and feel the same horrified, claustrophobic feelings they had when it they first encountered it. You’ll know when you get there. After the traumatized Edward runs out of the Thanatopsis Club, vowing never to return, he seeks comfort in a local whorehouse, only his second visit and experience of sex. He describes it to Moran in disturbing detail, offering details that would elicit a “TMI! TMI!” from most people, myself included. But rely on Lock to stir you up, rile your easily offended inner maiden auntie: Ravished is a nice word found in sentimental novels. Between us, Moran, the word that stuck in my mind like shit to the bottom of a shoe was fucked.And there it is. Why I have come to enjoy so much reading Norman Lock’s writing. It is never all one thing, one note, one temperament of that note. I value this highly because I see so many earnestly presented stories chipped and chipped and finally cracked into a pile of who-cares-dust. Offend me, anger me, and I might or might not pick up another of your books; bore me and we’re done here, this conversation is over.Meanwhile back in Philadelphia, Edgar realizes he has taken a step much too far by subjecting Edward to what he did. Edward has spent the intervening time vowing never, never, never, so as all the adults in the room know, Edward’s still infatuated with Poe and all he knows, does, and represents. Their make-up meeting, encouraged by Dr. Mütter himself which guarantees it will occur, seems to show Edward that Edgar is genuinely regretful:“Forgive me,” Poe repeated earnestly.I nodded coldly. I was not above acting like a child; I was hardly more than one.“I want you to have this,” he said, fishing a gold watch and chain from his pocket. He took a step toward me. I stood my ground. He closed the distance between us, the timepiece in his hand. “It belonged to my father, David Poe—not John Allan, who fostered me but would not adopt me. My real father was David Poe, Jr., the actor. It's said that he abandoned my mother and me. It's a lie. He died--too young: He was only twenty-seven.”I accepted his gift. It felt substantial in my hand. In spite of myself, I was pleased to have it.The tone of this scene is so like that of a couple making up after a fight that I had to pause and remind myself that this isn’t an erotic relationship. It was a time when, however, male friendships were much more intensely conducted than today.The darkest turn the friendship is ever to take comes not long after the earnest apology Edgar offers, and again at a meeting of the Thanatopsis Club. Edgar has been subtly preparing us, Edward included, for a genuine and unnerving crisis. Each of his acts before this has been explainable, but this one is simply and purely cruel, evil and cruel. The concept of the doppelgänger is a bit unnerving, to be sure: A person unrelated to yourself whose appearance, and sometimes behavior, is as close as possible without being identical twins. Placed in the hands of an unscrupulous man, knowledge of another person’s doppelgänger’s whereabouts can lead to nasty mischief. Edgar having found Edward’s doppelgänger in the form of a hanged murderer, whose likeness to Edward is marred only by a port-wine stain.Here begins Edward’s descent from nervous wreck to madman. Edgar and everyone around him will not let Edward’s fearful brain slow down for so much as a moment, playing tricks and (in Poe’s case) writing a story about an unfortunate young man named Edward who fancies he has a port-wine stain, which spreads and spreads, and...the story is incomplete. He steals the story in a fit of rage, and bewails ever having laid eyes upon Edgar Allan Poe. Edward’s unbalanced state sinks further as Edgar shows his genuine lack of human kindness by treating Edward’s fears of the port-wine stain merely as evidence of his theft and guilt.It is a profoundly painful ending for the book, resolving Edward’s story as confinement to the best possible care in a madhouse paid for by Dr. Mütter; released after six months, returning to his former position; his medical degree paid for, as a gift, by the Good Doctor; service as a field surgeon in the Civil War; finally, after a long life, tending the needs of a few established patients such as Walt Whitman, whose impression upon Stephen Moran in American Meteor was so very intense and is the link between Dr. Edward Fenzil and his audience Moran that is at the heart of Lock’s choice of narrative style.Dr. Fenzil thanks Moran for listening to him ramble, and for ignoring his disfigurement by the port-wine stain he carries as a reminder of a toxic friendship of long ago.