Tooth of the Covenant by Norman Lock

 

I hope to expose both the moral horror and criminal injustices of the age and to speak to their persistence in our own. ~Norman Lock interview

As a genealogist I have uncovered things about my ancestors that were meant to be kept secret, things no one ever talked about. 

There are the usual crimes--sneaking out of Russia to avoid serving in the Czar's army, marriages soon gone sour and the divorces never spoken of, children born out of wedlock. And some that are disturbing, like a beloved grandparent who admitted to a crime and was jailed, which was kept secret from his children.

I found the newspaper articles, first downplaying that anything would come of the charges, then his admission of guilt, then the ad where my grandmother sold off furniture. She moved the children to her parents home and they never knew their father spent three months in jail. 

Nathaniel Hawthorne's ancestor's sins were not hidden. They were in the history books. His great-great-grandfather John Hathorne was a Puritan judge in Salem, Massachusetts, who sent women and girls to their deaths, accused of witchery. To disassociate himself from this heritage, Nathaniel changed the spelling of his name.

Tooth of the Covenant, Norman Lock's eighth book in his American Novel series, places Nathaniel back in time, planning to arraign his ancestor and prevent the deaths. Framed as Nathaniel writing a story, using the persona Isaac Page, his journey through time alters his perception.

Salem in 1692 was a dangerous place. Isaac/Nathaniel uses his woodworking skill acquired at the failed idealist Brook Farm community to earn his bed and board on the fringes of Salem.

He drinks at taverns where men ignore the 'one and no more' mantra of the Puritans, and dangerously discusses theology condemned by the Puritans. Married in his own time, Issac/Nathaniel finds himself attracted to a pretty indentured servant. 

As Issac delays his mission, his resolve weakens, and fatally, he is able to see through the lens of the past and becomes allied to his detested great-grandfather.

We can judge the past, and yet we cannot escape it. We carry the prejudices and legacy forward, sometimes unthinking, sometimes purposefully. Our legacy insidiously skews our world view, distorts our perception.

"What are we if not our stories," Hawthorne/Lock writes early on, and he ends, "If there is witchery, it is in the stories that we tell, their power to enthrall, transform, uplift, and corrupt. A scarlet letter or a great while whale--what are they if not figures in a tableau behind which lie truths that can crack the foundation of the world and let the angels or the devils out into broadest day!" 

The American Novel series enthrall us as they break open the veneer of righteousness we sometimes claim for ourselves. We miss the log in our own eye when we think only of the sins of the past, for the past remains with us. 

I received an ARC from the publisher in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Tooth of the Covenant
by Norman Lock
Bellevue Literary Press

Publication July 6, 2021
Trade paper
ISBN: 9781942658832
Ebook US $16.99
ISBN: 9781942658849

From the Publisher

Best known for his novel The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne was burdened by familial shame, which began with his great-great-grandfather John Hathorne, the infamously unrepentant Salem witch trial judge. 

In this, the eighth stand-alone book in The American Novels series, we witness Hawthorne writing a tale entitled Tooth of the Covenant, in which he sends his fictional surrogate, Isaac Page, back to the year 1692 to save Bridget Bishop, the first person executed for witchcraft, and rescue the other victims from execution. 

But when Page puts on Hathorne’s spectacles, his worldview is transformed and he loses his resolve. As he battles his conscience, he finds that it is his own life hanging in the balance.

An ingenious and profound investigation into the very notion of universal truth and morality, Tooth of the Covenant probes storytelling’s depths to raise history’s dead and assuage the persistent ghost of guilt.

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The Feast Day of the Cannibals by Norman Lock

Norman Lock's sixth book in the American Novel Series delves into the ugly side of the Gilded Age. 

With a window view of the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, Shelby Ross visits his old friend Washington Robling, who is incapacitated, his capable wife overseeing the construction of the bridge his father designed. Ross tells his sad story to Robling, his fall from fortune forcing him to seek work, and the events that led to his imprisonment.

Having lost his business in the depression, Ross found employment at the Customs House, working under Herman Melville, a bitter, failed novelist. Ross also works with a dreamy younger man who pursues a friendship, while another co-worker, a sinister older man, harasses them as suspect homosexuals.

A man of numbers and business, Ross reads Melville's forgotten books and Moby Dick comes to influence him in dark ways. Ross passively plays into the hands of his nemesis, until his rage drives him to commit a crime of passion.

The Gilded Age world comes to life. It is populated with legendary people: Ross comes into contact with Mark Twain, who encourages a dying and broke Gen. Grant to write his memoirs to provide income to his beloved wife Julia. 

This is a dark novel of evil and hatred, of failed dreams, the bitterness of life's unjustness, and the many ways humans are all cannibals at heart.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through Edelweiss in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

from the publisher:

Feast Day of the Cannibals charts the harrowing journey of a tormented heart during America’s transformative age.

Feast Day of the Cannibals

by Norman Lock

Bellevue Literary Press

Publication: July 16, 2019

ISBN: 9781942658467, 194265846Xk

$16.99 USD, $22.99 CAD, £12.99 GBP

Norman Lock on the American Novel Series:

Through my American novels, I hope to understand, a little, the present American era by what came before and shaped its thought, beliefs, prejudices, virtues, vices, and emotional undertow.  --from the publisher's website.

I have enjoyed several of Norman Lock's American Novel Series. Read my reviews at:

The Wreckage of Eden
https://theliteratequilter.blogspot.com/2018/06/the-wreckage-of-eden-by-norman-lock.html

A Boy in His Winter
https://theliteratequilter.blogspot.com/2018/06/a-boy-in-his-winter-by-norman-lock.html

A Boy in His Winter by Norman Lock

In the year 2077 Huck Finn reflects back on his life, beginning in 1835 when he and the escaped slave Jim began their raft journey down the Mississippi River. Somehow they became time travelers until Hurricane Katrina shipwrecked Huck back into passing time.

Along the way, they saw America caught in wars, the marvel of electric lighting, and how racism kept its grip on society.

Jim got off the raft in 1960, finding a lynch mob waiting for him. In 2005 Huck meets James, who tries to keep him from harm. As an adult, Huck falls in love with Jameson, who becomes his wife. She writes a novel, The Boy In His Winter. Like Jim, James and Jameson are African American.

What Huck realizes from his vantage point of 85 years is how badly he treated Jim, how he accepted his society's values unthinking, diminishing Jim as a person and as a friend.

"I was bothered that I had come to hate him, bothered even more that I had loved him. I'm not sure that I regarded him then as a man. Not entirely. That broad view of humanity was alien to a mind that had been formed haphazardly, like a shack put together out of old lumber, warped and ill-used.(...)We'd wasted much time when we might have understood what was happening on the raft while we were close in on the river's end, which as not to be the journey's end, as I learned later." Huck Finn, A Boy in His Winter

At the end of his life, Huck returns to his hometown to play act Mark Twain, telling his own life stories. Huck calls his story a comedy, having seen enough for 'three or four lifetimes."

"Haven't you learned by now how fantastic a business it is to be alive?"-Huck Finn, A Boy in His Winter

The novel is episodic, meandering as the Mississippi River, but I was charmed by Huck's narrative, although there is nothing of innocence to be found. Huck is deformed by societal values, pursuing wealth and conspicuous consumption as an adult as thoughtlessly as he accepted slavery in his youth. With a broad overview of American history distilled into one lifetime, and grappling with memory and how the past is altered with our storytelling of it, Huck's tale shows the darkness behind what we remember as Twain's story of boyish freedom.

I received a book from the publisher as part of a LibraryThing giveaway.

The Boy in His Winter
Norman Lock
Bellevue Literary Press
$14.95
ISBN: 978-1-934137-76-5

The Wreckage of Eden by Norman Lock

War--The War with Mexico, the Mormon Rebellion, and the Civil War-- crushed any remaining faith held by U. S. Army Chaplin Robert Winter.

He clings to the memories of the few meetings he had with Emily Dickinson, his first love, although she has always kept him at a distance. When Winter married a pleasant but common girl he loved her in a way. When she dies, Winter relinquishes their daughter's care to his maiden aunt who lives in Amherst, calling on the Dickinson family to befriend her. He makes a poor father, the army sending him across the country and far from Amherst.

Winter does his duty to his country, reciting prayers for the benefit of the dying and over the bodies of the dead who died for the sacred cause of Manifest Destiny, mouthing words to a God he no longer believes in.

The Wreckage of Eden by Norman Lock spans decades of the 19th c and the awful carnage deemed necessary to America's destiny. Along his journey, Winter befriends Abe and Mary Lincoln in Springfield and meets a young Sam Clemens in Missouri. He sees the horror of war and the death camp at Andersonville. Required to visit imprisoned John Brown, their conversation challenges Winter's core beliefs.

Lock reproduces the era with period details and references to writers, politicians and military leaders, but it is Winter's internal world that captured my attention. Winter's spiritual crisis reflects the country's loss of idealism and its corruption, justifying slaughter while annexing Mexican lands. murdering Mormons and Native Americans, and profiting from the labor of enslaved people.

Meanwhile, in Amherst, Emily battles her own war against her dictatorial father who insists she can never marry. She speaks to Winter in cadences right from her poetry, with imagery and 'slant' insight.

Winter learns that he must perform his pastoral duty and endure. Sometimes that is all we can do. Our youthful idealism crumbles under the burgeoning knowledge of the evil men commit, we lose faith and mouth the words expected of us--prayers or pledges become empty symbols.

I wanted to note an epigram or sentence or insight on nearly every page. The issues Winter struggles with demonstrate that the roots of America's problems were planted in our early years.

I am eager to read more books in the American Novel Series by Norman Lock.

I received a free ARC from the publisher through a LibraryThing giveaway.

Find a Reading Group Guide at
http://blpress.org/reading-group-guides/reading-group-guide-wreckage-eden/

The Wreckage of Eden
by Norman Lock
Bellevue Literary Press
Publication Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN-10: 1942658389
ISBN-13: 978-1942658382