Review by New York Times Review
WHEN AMELIA GRAY was asked in an interview if she would always be a writer, she said: "If writing makes me feel like this for the rest of my life, I'll do it for the rest of my life, yes, of course. But maybe writing won't always make me feel like this and something else will replace it, and then I'll end up spending the rest of my life making candy or burning down churches." Gray, who is the author of two previous collections, "AM/PM" and "Museum of the Weird," and a novel, "Threats," does not need to change careers to achieve either goal - her new story collection, "Gutshot," is a bizarre and darkly funny world made of molten sugar and the ashes of everything she has set alight. "Gutshot" exhibits a wide range of style and theme. There are fables (a town is divided in half by a giant snake), horror stories (a woman is about to be killed in a stranger's house), absurd stories (two women get into an escalated battle of thankyou gifts, including a tube of mice that poop out a message) and more serious stories about love. It's sometimes difficult to gain purchase because the ground keeps shifting, yet this also has the seemingly intended effect of making the reader submissive. Reading "Gutshot" is a little like being blindfolded and pelted from all sides with fire, Jell-O and the occasional live animal. You'll be messy at the end and slightly beaten up, but surprised and certainly entertained. Many of Gray's characters allow themselves to act on their weirdest and darkest desires. Some are crazy people searching for real connection; the collection closes, for instance, with the tale of a young woman who drags her aging and decrepit mother to a burned-out rural shack she has taken as her lover (yes, the building itself is the lover). "And there, knees muddling the char, my girl kissed the brick. . . . Hunched there on the ground, she licked and gagged, whimpering as sweetly as when she nursed from my breast." Elsewhere the characters are "normal" people whose real emotional aches push them to do crazy things. In "House Heart," a couple hire a prostitute - but instead of paying her for sex, they lock her (naked) in the system of heating ducts in their house and leave her there indefinitely This is vintage Amelia Gray, a phantasmagoria of sex and love and perversion circling the idea of predator and prey, the idea of impulse and will and control. As with so many of her stories, she pushes against the outer limits of what humans can and will do. She seems to be testing her readers, too. Will you come with me here? How about if I take it a little further? Are you still game? Some stories will test readers and lose them. "Fifty Ways to Eat Your Lover" is just what it sounds like, a (successful) gross-out attempt. Another story includes a scene in which a woman cuts off a man's penis during sex, then sews herself closed around it. When the woman in "House Heart" begins to question the wisdom of locking a hooker in the vascular system of her home, her partner says, "Every life has its surrounding wall." In these pages we can hear Gray knocking on her surrounding wall. She's got the pickax at her feet and the hammer. Behind her is a wrecking ball. What she finds on the other side is anybody's guess. Whatever it is, Amelia Gray won't flinch. She'll write. RAMONA AUSUBEL is the author of "No One Is Here Except AÍÍ of Us" and "A Guide to Being Born."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 10, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
In Gray's (Threats, 2012) latest unique, punchy collection, she melds the inexplicable with everyday realities. In Year of the Snake, a large reptile divides a small town into North Snake and South Snake, and a local scientist turns an unusual discovery into a booming business. In House Heart, two lovers rent the services of a young woman and then enclose her inside the home's air ducts. Western Passages follows a narrator who befriends a young woman on a bus, determined to protect her from a leering passenger. Gray's bountiful five-part collection incorporates tales and vignettes both absorbing and unconventional: gods hold a yearly contest in which the winner (whoever can feel the most grief) is reunited with a lost loved one; a deceased mother's voice begins to emanate from her daughter's pimple; young twins place a curse on their mother; Fifty Ways to Eat Your Lover is a how-to list. While eccentricities are on display, Gray's stories also deftly capture the startling moments when her characters pull off their armor and reveal their genuine selves.--Strauss, Leah Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Strange, fable-like, and physical, Gray's (Threats) stories are driven by uncanny forces and set in organic yet unnatural worlds. The first story, "In the Moment," sets the tone, in which a man afraid of losing his beloved is soothed by her detached sensory perceptions: "Emily taught him to view each day as a wild element divorced from past and future. He needed not only to exist at a point on a vector but ultimately to destroy the vector and inhabit that solitary point, like living inside a meteor without fear or knowledge of its movement." The recurrence of a phenomenological experience of time flows through the stories, along with a materialist understanding that pushes in on human perception. In "The Year of the Snake," a massive snake bisects a town and disrupts the citizens until eventually the story's protagonist, a scientist, cuts open the snake, "peeling back to reveal that the flesh inside formed a cavern. She saw a lantern swinging gently from the knobby spine ceiling. A man sat at a table, calm as the moon." In "A Contest," the gods hold a contest: the mortal who grieves the most on Earth will be reunited with her departed, and at the story's abrupt end, an old, lonely woman is reunited with her cat-yet another instance of the masterly gathering of forces at the heart of the collection: black humor brushes up against abject tragedy, desperation and abuse, longing loneliness, and even hopeful peace. Gray dazzlingly renders the wide array of human experience in these potent, haunting stories. Agent: Claudia Ballard, WME Entertainment. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Gray won the Ronald Sukenick/American Book Review Innovative Fiction Prize for a previous collection, Museum of the Weird, which is certainly appropriate. Her stories, though starting out simply and told in polished, straightforward language, immediately turn edgy, disturbing, and even downright weird. Two men imprison a young woman they've hired in a large industrial vent, for instance, while townsfolk cleaning a graveyard end up attacking a gravestone. VERDICT Great for readers who like fiction that straddles the literary/horror divide (or simply the literary/way-out-there divide). © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The minute details of life are memorably rendered in surreal and sometimes grotesque ways. Many of the stories in this collection are set in a formerly familiar corner of the world that's been turned on its head. "It was my idea to rent the girl," writes the narrator of "House Heart," and the story that follows takes familiar elements and pushes them toward an eerie, transgressive place. A couple living in a space that was once "the preparation wing of a garment factory" rents a young woman for a game called House Heart, in which the threat of violence looms and the industrial remains of the residence become hiding spaces. This is Gray's fourth book (and third story collection), and it features the widest stylistic range of any of her books to date. Its predecessor, the novel Threats (2012), blended surreal imagery with questions of crime, violence and perception. Here, Gray combines those aspects of Threats with the concise and sometimes-absurdist tendencies that characterized her earlier collections. The irreverent "Go for It and Raise Hell" is metafiction walking into a bar for an unheard-of bender, while "Year of the Snake" begins as a riff on folk tales and shifts gears into something stranger, laced with body horror. There's also a grim, bittersweet comedy that comes to the forefront in stories such as "Device," in which a scientist creates a device that predicts the future; after two decidedly specific predictions, the inventor asks it what his future spouse will be like. " Skin, hair.' The device buzzed lightly. Fingernails.' " The response is both comic, with the machine eventually enveloped in a fit of pastoral reverie, and emotionally harrowing. The best of Gray's stories find that balance between devastation and humor and navigate an uneasy territory with agility; in this book, there are many that reach that mark. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
