In Java, a master of the shadow-puppet theater seeks to possess-by his art-a woman, who perishes as though by the contagion of his unnatural desire. Shadowplay is a meditation on story-telling as an act of seizure, a parable of obsession and of the danger of confounding the real with its representations.
"Stories compensate for lives unlived. They are what Norman Lock, or his avatar Guntur, calls shadows, negative reflections on a backlit screen, comprising, through artistry and brief illumination, ghosts. Lock's teller is imprisoned by darkness, captivated by warriors and princesses no longer, if ever, living. Death becomes a distance from which the voices of these unliving return. It is a journey as delicious as it is threatening."
-R.M. Berry
"Lock allows us to see the world through an Other’s eyes in such a way that by the end the difference between us…seems little more than a thin sheet of paper, if even that."
—Brian Evenson
"Wise up and get all you can of Lock. His writing was written by a writer exquisite in the singularity (read for this "genius") of his utterance."
-Gordon Lish
"[Lock's] prose is melodial, and alert to every signal from the unseen."
-Gary Lutz