In “Missing Persons” you’ll encounter a narrator who is forced to come to terms with the fact that he is a product of fiction. And you’ll likely discover that his situation, uncanny as it might be, bears a striking resemblance to our own lives, marked by mortality and the caprice of the universe.
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.
Norman Lock has written novels, short fiction, and poetry as well as stage plays, dramas for German radio, a film for The American Film Institute, and scenarios for video-art installations. His plays have been produced in the U.S., Germany, at the Edinburgh Theatre Festival, and in Turkey. His work has been translated into Dutch, German, Spanish, Turkish, and Japanese.
He received the Aga Kahn Prize, given by The Paris Review, the Literary Fiction Prize, given by The Dactyl Foundation of the Arts & Humanities, fellowships from the New Jersey Council on the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and from the National Endowment for the Arts. (source: http://www.normanlock.com/)
Brilliant, and just long enough to be effective. Also, the lawls are sneaky:
“I spend my days in bed while, from the next room, I hear the soft clatter of Marie’s word processor. I think how lucky I am to be dying in the age of advanced technology: the noise of an old-fashioned typewriter—with typebars clacking like castanets and bell tolling the end of each line—would have finished me.”