Born in Berlin in November 1940, Elias Deane Grimm Lohr, who has gone
by Grimm Lohr since he was a child, narrates the fascinating events of his
life and his family against the backdrop of the twentieth century, offering
as honest a replication of the facts as he can.
Grimm begins by recounting his German-British grandfather’s service as a physician in
Germany during the First World War, and then the life of his own father, the assistant to
the official translator of the German government during the Third Reich who disappeared
with the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad. After spending time in the South Pacific
where his American grandfather served as a diplomat during the Second World War,
Grimm and his family move to Normal, Illinois, where he matures, studies theater at
Northwestern University, and eventually moves to Los Angeles to seek employment in
the film and televison industries. As he pursues a career as a screenwriter and actor during
the 1970s and 1980s, he encounters, among others, a boisterous producer, a counterculture
director, a cannibalistic stalker, and the love of his life—a famous actress who
holds a dark secret. Finally tiring of the Hollywood scene, he decides to try to patent and
manufacture a device based in part on the work of his grandfather, a device also coveted
by one of the world’s richest men, and the ensuing conflict leads Grimm to a remote
and mysterious archipelago in the middle of the Indian Ocean called Morro Burra.
The Revelations of Grimm Lohr is a satirical and outrageous novel that explores the events
of the twentieth century as told through three generations of a German-American family.
