Love Among the Particles

Mr. Hyde finally reveals his secrets to an ambitious journalist, unleashing unforeseen horrors. An ancient Egyptian mummy is revived in 1935 New York to consult on his Hollywood biopic. A Brooklynite suddenly dematerializes and passes through the internet, in search of true love…

Love Among the Particles is virtuosic storytelling, at once a poignant critique of our romance with technology and a love letter to language. In a whirlwind tour of space, time, and history, Norman Lock creates worlds that veer wildly from the natural to the supernatural via the pre-modern, mechanical, and digital ages. Whether reintroducing characters from the pages of Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twain, Franz Kafka, and Gaston Leroux, or performing dizzying displays of literary pyrotechnics, these stories are nothing less than a compendium of the marvelous.

Norman Lock is the award-winning author of novels, short fiction, and poetry, as well as stage, radio, and screenplays. He has won The Dactyl Foundation Literary Fiction Award, The Paris Review Aga Kahn Prize for Fiction, and writing fellowships from the New Jersey Council on the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Aberdeen, New Jersey.

Shelf Awareness Best Book of the Year

Vol. 1 Brooklyn Favorite Book of the Year

Atlantic Wire Spring Book Preview Recommendation

Kirkus Reviews Best Book Out This Week

“A magnetic pull transcends the pages of [Love Among the Particles], making for a fully addictive collection.” —Slice magazine

“This fantastical collection of short stories is a joyous compendium of characters time-traveling through the annals of literary history—Mr. Hyde, Henry James, and Huckleberry Finn to name a few.” —Barnes and Noble Review

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

“Stories make their own realities, just as histories do, and Locks uniquely intricate understanding of this dynamic is what makes these tales so inimitable.” —Full Stop

“[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 . . . taking a trope that seems familiar to readers of the weird but analysing it in the fiercest detail.” —Weird Fiction Review

“A masterpiece . . . deeply thought provoking, filled to the brim with wit, and imaginative beyond belief, Love Among the Particles is a book for all who have ever dreamed and long to do so again.” —Akashic Insider

“Norman Lock once again proves himself a master storyteller . . . These stories are brilliantly imaginative and wonderfully unsettling.” —Largehearted Boy

“Locks writing is beautiful, with clean, clear, perfect sentences . . . seducing the reader with language and narrative into a fully realized alternative world to say something new about our own. . . . Love Among the Particles is topical, astonishing and provocative . . . a masterful collection.” —Shelf Awareness for Readers (starred review)

“[Locks stories] are gems, rich in imagination and language. Readers will happily suspend disbelief, perhaps even finding particles of humor . . . 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.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Enticingly and enigmatically relevant for the present . . . these humorous, imaginative meditations on the nature of dreams, time, and space shimmer in their own darkness. . . . Reminiscent of the plays of Samuel Beckett, there is a wealth of insight here.” —Publishers Weekly

Praise for Norman Lock

“Our finest modern fabulist.” —Bookslut

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

“One could spend forever worming through [Locks] magicked words, their worlds.” —Believer

“[Locks] window onto fiction [is] a welcome one: at once referential and playful, occupying a similar post-Borges space to the short stories of Stephen Millhauser and Neil Gaiman.” —Vol. 1 Brooklyn

“No other writer in recent memory, lives up to [Whitmans] declaration that behind every book there is a hand reaching out to us, a hand to be held onto, a hand that has the power to touch us, to make us feel.” —Detroit Metro Times

“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 Windeye and Immobility

“[Locks stories] are gems, rich in imagination and language . . . For all their convolutions of space and time, these stories are remarkably easy to follow and savor.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Mr. Hyde finally reveals his secrets to an ambitious journalist, unleashing unforeseen horrors. An ancient Egyptian mummy is revived in 1935 New York to consult on his Hollywood biopic. A Brooklynite suddenly dematerializes and passes through the internet, in search of true love…

Love Among the Particles is virtuosic storytelling, at once a poignant critique of our romance with technology and a love letter to language. In a whirlwind tour of space, time, and history, Norman Lock creates worlds that veer wildly from the natural to the supernatural via the pre-modern, mechanical, and digital ages. Whether reintroducing characters from the pages of Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twain, Franz Kafka, and Gaston Leroux, or performing dizzying displays of literary pyrotechnics, these stories are nothing less than a compendium of the marvelous.

Norman Lock is the award-winning author of novels, short fiction, and poetry, as well as stage, radio, and screenplays. He has won The Dactyl Foundation Literary Fiction Award, The Paris Review Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, and writing fellowships from the New Jersey Council on the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Aberdeen, New Jersey.