The Port-Wine Stain

April 25, 2016
Lock has made a specialty of reimagining the American literary past: earlier works in what he calls the American Novels series took up Huck Finn and Walt Whitman (The Boy in His Winter and American Meteor, respectively). Now he fictionalizes Edgar Allan Poe, who takes the story’s narrator on a tour of darkness—the dark side of 1840s Philadelphia and the more nefarious workings of the human mind. When he meets Poe, naïve young Edward Fenzil becomes obsessed with him, readily falling under his “dark enchantment,” and as he tells the story 30 years later, it is clear that this moment has shaped his worldview, his life’s trajectory, and his sense of self. Poe plays rough—briefly shutting Fenzil up in a coffin, for instance, so he can pick Fenzil’s brain about the experience—but still Fenzil cannot tear himself away from Poe. In the language of the time, there is an affinity between them, but for Lock, that electric linking is also found in the power of story, which, as Fenzil says, functions as “a hook, a barb.” Indeed, Poe’s most lasting effect on Fenzil comes through a tale he writes (ably concocted by Lock). The problem here is that as a storyteller Fenzil lacks Poe’s concision: there is too much foreshadowing, too much rumination on the nature of evil, free will versus fate, and the sciences of mesmerism and phrenology. Yet this is a worthy volume in Lock’s American Novels series, and readers will find him to be an ideal guide for a trip into the past.

April 1, 2016
Doppelgangers, literary intrigue, unhealthy obsessions, and a secret society of the death-obsessed menace a young man in this novel of 1840s Philadelphia. Lock's novel is structured as a long remembrance told by an aging doctor, Edward Fenzil, working in Camden, New Jersey, in 1876. The story he tells is about his life in Philadelphia 32 years earlier, when he worked as an assistant to Thomas Dent Mutter, a surgeon fond of medical oddities, and became acquainted with Edgar Allan Poe. Gradually, Poe initiates Fenzil into an subculture of people who work with death. Fenzil's mind begins to fray as he becomes fixated, first on Poe and then on his newly discovered doppelganger. Both the presence of Poe and the fact that this is a long monologue by a not-necessarily-reliable narrator add an abundance of tension to the proceedings. Occasionally, the tone becomes dreamlike, as in a story told by a cohort of Poe's about the fate that befell the captain of a slave ship. This is the third in Lock's American Novels series: works that harken back to 19th-century history and culture. Each is self-contained, though readers of Lock's earlier American Meteor (2015) will note that the "Moran" to whom this novel is told is that novel's protagonist. (This book's chilling final sentence has a secondary meaning for those who have read its predecessor.) Beyond the presence of Poe, other literary figures hover on the book's margins--the framing story includes several mentions of Walt Whitman, and in his acknowledgements, Lock notes the influence of John Berryman's Dream Songs on one structural aspect of the novel. This chilling and layered story of obsession succeeds both as a moody period piece and as an effective and memorable homage to the works of Edgar Allan Poe.

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Starred review from April 15, 2016

In this third in the "American Novels" series (set in 1844 and as polished as its predecessors, The Boy in His Winter and American Meteor), an impressionable young Philadelphian named Edward Fenzil reveres both surgeon Thomas Dent Mutter, a collector of medical oddities, and gothic master Edgar Allan Poe. Increasingly identifying with a murderer whose ghastly skull he has received as a prank, Edward sees himself in Poe's story "The Port-Wine Stain" (down to a presumed stain on his check) and accuses Poe of stealing his life. VERDICT An enthralling and believable picture of the descent into madness, told in chillingly beautiful prose that Poe might envy.

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