Reading a Kevin Moffett story strongly resembles Kevin Moffett’s description of reading a story. This is so much the case that the titular opening story from his latest collection, Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events, almost serves as an aesthetic statement, an ars poetica, or ars fictiona. The narrator, Frederick Moxley, discovers his father has been writing and publishing stories under their shared name, stories which call into question Fred Jr.’s memories about their family and his deceased mother. Peppered throughout are aesthetic statements regarding fiction. The narrator’s former writing instructor, Hodgett, who is fond of citing rules and grandiose mantras while fondling himself behind his desk, says his stories are all real life, that anything worth saying can’t be said, which is why we write fiction. Fred Sr. says stories are dreams. Fred Jr., upset by the fact that his hobbyist father, who never studied creative writing, appears to be outwriting him, disagrees for the sake of disagreement and says they’re jars of bees. The rest of the collection consists of third person stories that somehow satisfy all these aesthetic statements at once. They feel uncannily dreamlike while remaining rooted in real life.

“Imagine a time for your characters, Hodgett used to say, when things might have turned out differently. Find the moment a choice was made that made other choices impossible. Readers like to see characters making choices.”

The eight remaining stories revolve around the issue of choice: making choices, having them made for you, or dealing with the fallout. In “Border to Border,” for instance, Maxim, a worker in the Estonian corner of the capitalist-theme-park Small World, debates between taking out an expensive loan to replace the crown he’s swallowed, or waiting for it to come out the other end, wash it off, and have it put back in. The story’s setting and humor make it clear why George Saunders chose Moffett’s first collection, Permanent Visitors, as the winner of the John Simmons Short Fiction Award. At its core lies the simple choice of how Maxim will navigate his bizarro life and workplace. Other stories explore the time after an irreversible choice. In “First Marriage,” Tad and Amy have just been married by a judge in Lake Havasu City, Arizona (“Home of the London Bridge” according to the billboards: it seems the couple have just come from a setting much like Small World), and blaze eastward toward Florida in a borrowed car, feeling out the results of their impulsive decision. “English Made Easy,” on the other hand, concerns a lack of choice: Lena’s husband has passed away and she’s forced to cope.

“Why did this simple static image seem like such a rare coin?”

Moffett has a knack for teasing out the uncanny and letting it speak for itself. He constantly presents unsettling situations and images, uncalled-for and inappropriate feelings, conversations with vaguely menacing minor characters, miscommunications and misunderstandings—all of which foster a sense of unease. Lena spends a good portion of “English Made Easy” walking alone around her neighborhood. The strangeness of life without her husband pains her. The houses seem to take on their own lives; they “float together and separate like boats in a bay.” Lena hears “the hollow, bone-like tock of bamboo chimes nearby […] a mournful, an awful sound to broadcast through the neighborhood.” Lena lies to the other characters she meets without completely understanding why.

She encounters, repeatedly, an older woman named Mrs. Appleman who suffers from an “exquisitely benign dementia.” Sometimes she remembers Lena, sometimes she doesn’t, and either way it’s eerie, as though Lena beholds the future of her own fading mind. Mrs. Appleman offers totemic statements that don’t feel entirely welcome or accurate but are also spot-on in some obscure way, such as when she calls Lena’s son a “warm little fortune cookie” or says Lena looks like she “just found a lost race.” Later in the story, when Lena runs across some bikes and thinks “if bikes were horses,” she “leaves the thought incomplete, lets it grow untended, like a deep-woods weed.” This is one of Moffett’s biggest gifts: leaving a thought or image in its fragmented and suggestive state; trusting that it will grow untended in our minds.

At the end of “Further Interpretations,” after much stalling, Fred Jr. finds himself home for the holidays. Fred Sr., who can shake presents and divine their contents, shakes one in front of his son. Listen closer, he says. This is the warm-hearted center of Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events, the aesthetic that really distinguishes this collection. There are plenty of writers who attempt to work in George Saunders’s style, one of absurdity and satire and capital letters, but what they often miss is the morality and heart at its core. Moffett misses nothing. He follows his own advice and listens closely, to the detail, to the mystery, and to his characters’ plights. You’d be wise to do the same.

[Leader quotes from Moffett's story, "Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events"]

Further Links & Resources

• Browse inside the title story on the HarperPerennial.
• Buy a copy of Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events on Amazon, IndieBound or Powell’s.
• Read an interview with Kevin Moffatt conducted by the University of Pittsburgh.

Sound familiar? In a post-Sex and the City era, much of Bierlein’s literary ground feels well-trod. We’ve come to expect the cheeky sex talk, the blasé infidelity, and – above all – the redemptive power of female friendship. We’re no longer shocked when a woman who seemingly has it all considers throwing it away for a man who doesn’t deserve her. And the remaining storylines are equally predictable: a grieving woman finds solace in a European lover; a wife battles her mother-in-law for her husband’s attention; friends from college gather to celebrate an engagement and marvel at their varying life paths. Although Bierlein’s prose is cleanly delivered and snappily paced, her collection too often tells us stories we’ve heard before.

Which is a shame, because the glimpses we catch of Bierlein’s originality take us beyond the tropes of chick lit to someplace magical. In the opening story, “A Vacation on the Island of Ex-Boyfriends,” two girlfriends head off on a vacation to Nantucket, only to find themselves instead on an island inhabited by every man they’ve ever dated, lined up in chronological order. It’s a fantastic premise, and Bierlein heightens the payoff by juxtaposing the impossible scenario with unassuming, economical prose: “In three days we have played, cried, ran, fought, laughed, danced, and built fires with them all —every man we’ve ever wanted. We’re exhausted.”

Similarly, the final story in the collection, “An Interrogation at the Prison of Ex-Girlfriends,” gives us a roomful of mistresses tied up for questioning by an angry wife and her whip-cracking assistant. Like, “A Vacation…,” there’s a suspension of disbelief required here, and a sense of time-out-of-time. Our narrator ponders

If this had happened when we were together I would have told him, Your biggest problem right now is that I sort of like her. Certainly undertaking a group abduction requires more verve that I had ever imagined from a wife.

In Bierlein’s world, revenge is a dish that tastes even better with a little self-deprecating humor.

With these two stories, Bierlein demonstrates exactly how much verve she’s capable of delivering. Here’s hoping her next collection will serve up even more.

Extras

• Read Bierlein’s writings, including a self-interview, at The Nervous Breakdown.
• Listen to a podcast of Bierlein’s AWP conference panel, in which she offers advice to emerging writers.

As a Pulitzer Prize-nominated poet and MacArthur Fellow, it’s no surprise Perillo’s writing is stunning in its precision and imagery. Perillo takes us on tours of the seaside, the country, and the urban with a never-been-used-before lens. All the while, narrative doesn’t take a backseat to description. Yes, her characters are quite often stuck—in country houses, in addiction, in love, in geriatric homes—but they’re never standing still, and that distinction is what gives this collection an undeniable urgency. Perhaps these stories would not easily sell on premise alone (woman becomes deeply obsessed with her vacuum cleaner) but they are better, more surprising for it.

Perillo’s prose leads us down an unwritten path, as we discover the secret worlds of her characters and their enemies: their obsessions, their boredom, their fantasies of revenge, and their hearts. The prose is so unabashedly honest that you will follow these characters wherever they’re headed: a mother who spies on her son through the woods, a sister whose main goal in life is to stay fourteen forever, a woman recovering from alcohol abuse and seventeen Bad Boys, a wife who fantasizes about the life of the French President while stuck in a cabin (stuck in this marriage, in this life) with her husband.

Perhaps the collection is best described in my favorite story, “Doctor Vick’s,” when Perillo writes, “You know the only true world is the one you carry inside you.” These stories are compelling journeys because they are so true.

Extras

• Get a copy of Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain at Amazon, IndieBound, or Powell’s.
• Read Lucia Perillo’s poem “This Red T-Shirt” – published in The New Yorker, May 10, 2010.

Jon McGregor, Britain’s second best short story writer (his website proclaims), has published three novels – two on the Booker long list – but this is his first story collection. Each section, and each story, bears the name of a different town in Lincolnshire (I looked them up), an agricultural county on England’s Eastern coast filled with fens, salt marshes, and earthworks built up against the sea. It’s a strangely blank landscape, not quite dreary, but overcast, obscure. You could say McGregor knows that landscape like the back of his hand, only it’s doubtful we’d know our hands so well.

The stories begin and end in medias res. Horrible events occur offstage and the reader scrabbles over hard ground, looking for rise, rock, or weir to gain a vantage point. Ironic, since Lincolnshire is noted for its flatness. The word “suspense” springs to mind. McGregor holds a black belt in misdirection. In “The Chicken and The Egg” a man fears cracking an egg to find an embryonic chicken – a study in dread. “The Last Ditch” gives a detailed plan for surviving an anticipated crisis, which has obviously fallen into the “authority’s” redacting, footnoting hands. Even at half a page, “Dig a Hole” ignites terror as a mob chants, “Dig a hole and fucking bury him.” Many narrators remain unnamed, a canny choice in a collection that forces so many decisions – which characters to trust, what Prisoner J. Disputed – on the reader.

McGregor’s surprises feel honest. You settle into the story you think he’s telling, only to discover near the end that isn’t the story you’d signed up for at all. The real magic occurs – and often – when he lets the reader fill in all the dark, dread drama. The great horror auteurs know this – anticipation is all.  Cut away from the moment of violence at the last minute and you scar your viewer forever. The quick mind rabbits ahead to the worst.

In “Wires,” a sugar beet flies through a young woman’s windshield, demanding attention. We should know better. In this story, McGregor seamlessly includes technology: the girl tracks her mood in status-updates. We all – or at least 845 million of us – know exactly what she’s on about. It’s just there, as culturally universal and blasé as a toaster, no fanfare required. There has been much ham-fisted deployment of Brave New Technology in fiction; seeing it treated merely as a mental tic is refreshing.

Status update: Emily Wilkinson regrets not having signed up for breakdown insurance.

Meanwhile the reader frets: you should be worried about a hell of a lot more than that.

The stories, united by geography, cover a wild range of form and subject, but one mood prevails: loneliness. I pity the character who finds himself in McGregor’s hands, for isolation will plague him, and disaster will visit like an unwelcome guest. But it’s delicious reading. There are scenes of domestic unease and wide-scale societal breakdown, but McGregor refrains so fully from judgment that it’s never clear if the police state paranoia is madness, or a rational assessment of the situation. “If It Keeps On Raining” describes a modern-day Noah, building a tree house to escape a flood, untrustworthy – possibly insane – but impossible to dismiss. Besides, floods and rain recur throughout the collection – one can’t be too sure. One of the most inventive stories in the collection, “Supplementary Notes To The Testimony Of Appellants B & E,” give an appendix to a legal proceeding which reads like straining to hear the audio track of a horror movie from the next room.

“We Wave and Call” opens thus:

And sometimes it happens like this: a young man lying face down in the ocean, his limbs hanging loosely beneath him, a motorboat droning slowly across the bay, his body moving in long, slow ripples with each passing shallow wave, the water moving softly across his skin, muffled shouts carrying out across the water …

I wouldn’t trust anyone who thinks that boy is alive … and yet he is. McGregor embeds the shard of dread, then immediately turns to playfulness, but he makes his point: we survive by assumptions, but they also undo us. We’re never sure where the text ends and imagination begins. That’s the brilliance of any successful collection, and this one in particular: it’s all on the page. McGregor employs the alchemy between word and reader to great effect.

The collection that kept coming to mind was Dubliners, that restless unease that pulsed beneath Joyce’s epiphanic stories – people casting about for a revelation, a grand purpose, one that soon arrived in the blood-washed trenches of Europe. Even neutral Ireland felt the effects. What comes next in McGregor’s salt-blasted flatlands may be boogieman or apocalypse, but you can be sure it’s big and bad. As one character says of his friend, “Thing with Ray is he’s one of those people who can drink as much as they want without causing any problems. It’s when the drink runs out is when you want to watch him.” In this world, it’s no surprise that sobriety trumps drunkenness in misery. When Ray launches into an unhappy tale, his friend laments, “Later he told me how the story had ended. Like I’d been hanging on waiting for the final installment.” The thing is, we have.

Further Links & Resources

• Ever wonder what successful writers were doing a decade earlier? A Guardian profile of McGregor gives you a glimpse of the author as a young(er) man in 2002.
• Get a copy of This Isn’t The Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You on Amazon, Indiebound, or Powell’s.

And now, W.W. Norton hopes, This Will Be Difficult to Explain, a new collection from Johanna Skibsrud, Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning author of The Sentimentalists.

This Will Be Difficult to Explain is a slim, lime-colored book with a picture of a lackadaisical girl on the cover. It holds nine stories in just one hundred and sixty-nine pages, but although the book feels light in the hand, the stories pack a concentrated, emotional punch. Throughout, the writing follows a particular kind of literary formula, a type of late-century naturalism mixed with minimalism, meaning the ingredients include unpretentious language, ordinary characters, and simple situations that, as the characters live through them, grow increasingly difficult. Instead of pyrotechnics, though, or melodramatic confrontation, the stories fade away with an image meant to convey the deep profundity of the human condition. Take, for example, the end of “French Lessons,” when the narrator reflects on a past employer. The Madame, an old blind woman, reveals that her son committed suicide, and later the narrator can’t stop thinking about it:

Later, she couldn’t help wondering if the boy had really done it like that (Madame’s forefinger, aimed at her throat), or if perhaps it had been performed somewhat differently, or even not at all, but that Madame could think—at that time—of only one foolproof method by which so great a sadness might be explained, or conveyed.

Many of the stories contain moments such as this, where a character’s small interaction with someone else leaves an enduring echo. The characters colliding with one another don’t share a pattern, and include many different types of people in different situations, from a father and his daughter to a visitor at a hotel and the waitress who serves him. Usually, though, these people remain strangers, at least in some sense, even though they are also drawn together by circumstance or accident, and each person is changed in the encounter.

So although Skibsrud has defied industry expectations by releasing a novel and then a collection, she will have no trouble amassing a following. And no one will question how or why she has appeared as a rising star among those who love literary fiction—in fact, it won’t be difficult to explain at all.

Extra

• Read an interview with Johanna Skibsrud on Maison Neuve.

The story opens as Amina attempts to settle into George’s house. Before coming to the US she slept in a bed with her mother every night. Her father slept on a separate cot in the same room. The scenes that focus on Amina staring out the windows of the suburban house in winter are intercut with her memories of Bangladesh, and the contrast highlights the hush of her loneliness, and the strangeness of her new life.

When Amina returns to Desh to escort her parents through the post-9/11 visa circus, she recognizes in her relatives’ questions about America her own previous fantasies of that life. When she disagrees with George, he often ducks the argument by sighing, “cultural differences…” as an excuse, and it would be easy to read that gap of understanding as the novel’s chief concern. In fact, it is a novel about imagination: how it can fail us, or mislead us, color our self image.

The fantasy of America looms large around the globe: a land of opportunity, a fresh start, a bully, an enigma, a screen for projected desires. It is striking that Amina, the devoted daughter and dutiful wife, who nurtured her American dreams for years, has many difficulties with empathy. For her, imagination ends at other people’s inner lives. Freudenberger makes her so sympathetic that we don’t recognize Amina’s blindness until late in the novel, when she embarrasses a family friend, Nasir. Some disconnects do arise from cultural misunderstandings, but these resolve quickly—Amina is smart. In many ways this is less a novel about learning to become an American than learning to become an adult.

Amina’s parents prepared their only child for achievement, and when the family falls on hard times in Bangladesh, she willingly assumes the savior’s mantle. She worries about convincing George to help bring her parents to America, about her part-time jobs, and about money. She endures sex, George’s family, and George, but although she takes on these adult responsibilities, in many ways her thinking remains childish. She never really second-guesses her decision to leave Bangladesh. She finds it difficult to question the life she has chosen. George and Nasir and Amina’s parents all have secrets, and somehow in her resentment over these secrets, Amina forgets that she has her own. Freudenberger writes,

As a girl she’d often imagined a sort of magic that could give her a glimpse of the person she would one day marry. The likelihood that he existed somewhere made this fantasy even more irresistible, and she could spend hours daydreaming about it in the opulent apartments of her students, waiting for them to arrive at the solutions to simple problems. How thrilled she would’ve been if she’d been able to see George then: a man already, hardworking and reliable, decent looking if not overly handsome, sitting at a computer in an American office. The desire to be sixteen again was suddenly so powerful that a sound escaped her, something between a gasp and a groan.

Culture does not define this scene; such youthful longings are universal. It’s familiar to daisy pluckers the world over—loves me, loves me not. Both family circumstance and her image of America-as-promised-land hobble Amina’s desires—a fact so painful it elicits that gasp. It’s better to be sixteen, dreaming of being twenty-five, than the other way around. Marriage ties Amina to George, but not exactly as she expects, and she imagines herself, as so many people do, into the life she thinks she ought to have, which isn’t necessarily the life she wants.

Amina’s trouble with imagination extends to George’s cousin, Kim. The black sheep of the family, Kim is Amina’s opposite: the not-dutiful daughter. Kim married (briefly) an Indian man and spent time in India, so she expects to click with Amina, since Bangladesh is India’s neighbor. Their interactions reveal unflattering truths—that even well-traveled Americans can assume homogeneity across huge swaths of the globe. Dhaka and Bombay are, of course, miles apart geographically and culturally. But Kim also embodies an American optimism and empathy, traits Amina overlooks.

If this novel has a flaw, it’s in the flatness of many of the secondary characters. I was annoyed by the portrayal of George early on until I realized that he is two-dimensional to the reader because he is still two–dimensional to Amina. He represents her idea of an American husband, not a person. Still, he doesn’t grow much on the page as the novel advances, and Freudenberger relies too much on Amina as an unreliable narrator. When she honestly can’t see a facet of a character’s personality that’s one thing, but withheld information frequently appears with this as an excuse.

Freudenberger’s writing is often described as “witty” or “sly” and though parts of the novel display humor, in contrast to Lucky Girls this book is incredibly earnest. While the first half feels measured, slow even, the building wave of problems and misunderstandings that befall Amina’s family at the end of the novel kept me turning the pages impatiently, and finally brought me to tears. The Newlyweds delivers both a cautionary tale about the failure of imagination, and a monument to its power. It argues that in a country built by immigrants, and fueled by dreams, only the difficult work of understanding each other can save us.

Further Links and Resources

If you have read Mrs. Dalloway (and what self-respecting fiction writer or fiction lover hasn’t?), you will likely recognize some similarities between An Unexpected Guest and Virginia Woolf’s famous novel even without the benefit of the jacket copy’s reminder. In fact, Korkeakivi’s novel could just as easily have been titled Mrs. Moorhouse (or perhaps Madame Moorhouse). Like Clarissa Dalloway, Clare Moorhouse spends the single day in which the novel unspools preparing for and hosting a dinner party. She’s quite fond of flowers, too.

Madame Moorhouse is the American-born wife of a high-ranking British diplomat based in Paris. We learn quickly that her husband desires a plum appointment to Dublin, and that this prize may well be in reach—if the evening’s dinner party proceeds smoothly. But her Irish ancestry notwithstanding (Madame Moorhouse was née Clare Siobhan Fennelly), our protagonist has reasons to worry about a transfer to Dublin. Those reasons—and a ghostly presence from her past—haunt her as she goes about her day in Paris.

An Unexpected Guest transpires in a rarefied world, and that may distance some readers. If scenes that unfold in gourmet supermarkets and museum gardens don’t appeal to you, this book might not either. I’m a Francophile, so the frequent inclusion of French dialogue pleases me. But, as I learned back as an MFA student, there are those who believe that “people who use ‘foreign’ words in their fiction are just showing off.” Again, if that’s your disposition, you might choose to steer clear of this book.

Which would be too bad, because you’d miss a satisfying reading experience and the chance to consider anew the ways in which earlier literature can influence new writerly generations. And, of course, you’d be missing an inexpensive, luggage- and logistics-free trip to Paris.

Extras

• Preview (and, if you like, purchase) Korkeakivi’s “Folding Paper,” an Atlantic Fiction for Kindle offering.
• If you haven’t (gasp) read Mrs. Dalloway, Project Gutenberg will make things right.
• If you’ll be in Paris anytime soon—or if you simply wish to imagine what your literary life might be like there—you’ll find Laurel Zuckerman’s Paris Writers News posts and updates most valuable.

The Cove’s story starts forty years earlier, near the end of World War I, during the last summer a brother and sister live on a cursed family farm. Three characters share the novel’s close-third narration, but the bulk belongs to Laurel Shelton, a woman with a large purple birthmark on her shoulder. Her father bought the farm cheap, unaware of local superstition; “There were stories of hunters who’d come into the cove and never been seen again, a place where ghosts and fetches wandered.” The Sheltons enter folklore when the father collapses in a field and the mother dies of a poisoned limb that “turned the color of Laurel’s stained skin.” Marked by the cove “as its own” in the eyes of neighbors, Laurel becomes an exile and a burden to her brother, whose war wound buys him community acceptance. Then, Laurel discovers a mute flutist hiding deep inside the cove. An accident draws him out of the woods and into her home, where they fall in love through gesture and music.

Admittedly, the plot reads like a doomed romance novel with a dark twist. That said, the author layers the story with historical details that help it transcend that fate. Central to the novel is a German internment camp located just west of Mars Hill. Here, the government interned the crew and orchestra (the origins of the flutist) of the Vaterland—a German luxury liner seized and renamed Leviathan. The ambiguity and paranoia of wartime patriotism drive the violence of the novel’s subplot (see: a skull in a well). Yet, Rash lets real horror creep into his reader’s imagination like the dark water that will drown the valley. That ominous cliff just breaking the surface like the tip of an iceberg, so that  “people would have no inkling it was once immense enough to shadow a whole cove.”

Extra

• Profile of Ron Rash’s roots in Appalachian culture on the Western Carolina website. Rash reflects on his grandfather – who couldn’t read or write – and the gift of storytelling he passed to his young grandson.

Regina O’Melveny

Extra

Amelia Gray’s debut novel Threats (FSG Originals) follows her two story collections AM/PM and Museum of the Weird. (Doesn’t count in a title, people.) Gray excels at evoking mood. But like the ground in an earthquake, you can’t rely on past experience to dictate expectations. You get this from the stories, but here Gray’s larger canvas allows for curious resonances and even further distortions. The facts seem clear: David, a failed dentist, loses his wife, Franny, a cosmetologist. He doesn’t so much lose her as witness her death, one that remains mysterious and unexplained for the entire book.

She was standing at the bottom of the stairs. She held the rail and tipped her head back to look at her husband. They held the same rail. “You’ve been tromping berries,” he said.

“It’s blood.” She held the stair’s rail …

Gray creates an unsettling physical presence with that rail, the narrative eye drawn to it like a magnet, even with a blood-soaked Franny the most important thing in the room. Anyone who has encountered violence can attest to the randomness of what details remain: the color of your attacker’s shoelaces, the pigeon with a French fry in its beak just before the window shattered.

Throughout the book, David listens to the final message Franny left on the home answering machine (there’s one for the time capsule). Through repetition it transforms into a cipher.

Hey. Please wash and prep the vegetables before I get home. We’re in a hurry. Sorry. See you.

The things we leave behind: the ghosts of unexecuted intent, best laid plans.

Threats meanders. David begins finding typed, handwritten, scribbled threats hidden in the crevices of his and Franny’s shared life. Tucked behind picture frames, sitting on counters where they hadn’t been before, among Franny’s things from the beauty parlor – they appear everywhere.

I WILL CROSS-STITCH AN IMAGE OF YOUR FUTURE HOME BURNING. I WILL HANG THIS IMAGE OVER YOUR BED WHILE YOU SLEEP.

Both vague and terrifying, Gray’s capacity for evoking menace remains unflagging throughout:

I WILL LOCK YOU IN A ROOM MUCH LIKE YOUR OWN UNTIL IT BEGINS TO FILL WITH WATER.

Has Franny been stalked for years, or could these threats somehow be from her, albeit requiring a bit of supernatural finagling? Has the universe learned how to type? These threats are artful, fascinating, and unexplained.

Curious interludes ensue: a woman who appears to live at the Laundromat; a detective, Chico, as hapless as Clouseau; a therapist, Marie, who squats in David’s garage, continually stung by resident wasps; David’s doppelganger loose in the neighborhood. These are but a few phenomenon in Ms. Gray’s phantasmagoria. It creates a level of discomfort in the reader, amid characters who themselves undergo no small level of bafflement.

This novel gives a litmus test to its audience: will you revel in the cross-currents of David’s strange trip, or will you tense up and refuse to fall under the hypnotic qualities of Gray’s work? There is no right answer, but like sitting in the dentist’s chair: it helps if you relax. As Marie, the interloping mental health professional, says, “If you release yourself to the potential of help, anyone can be helpful.” Do you enjoy the ride or fault it for not being as expected? Then again, how did you form that expectation? Damn, but Amelia Gray is brave. Not many young authors debut with a long, hard gaze into the void.

David puts many things into his mouth, as though consumption equaled control, comprehension, and comfort. An infant’s approach to the world: curiosity expressed through taste. The novel subverts its own repetitions, in a way that allies us with David’s oral fixation—it sounds quite nice to find solace in the familiar, warm, and confined space of a mouth. Yet even this image becomes strange, when one encounters this description of a kiss:

She pressed her face down with the idea of crushing him and kissed his tongue and teeth, sucking the fluids there, tasting bitter coffee and mouthwash, internalizing his mouth, pressing his face harder and licking the strangely flat surface of his back teeth, wishing for a moment that she could take his teeth in her mouth and chew on them, feel the foreign against familiar, his teeth embedding in her cheeks like cloves in an orange.

Patently disgusting, yet transfixing, and if the reader steps back a moment to think of the romantic kisses of literature, it begins to dawn that they are, in fact, romanticized. Gray’s wholly grotesque description may be closer to the truth, but it also begs the question of why we were so concerned with accuracy in the first place, when the un-gilded lily can be, well, revolting.

Like a kaleidoscope, shift your perspective one degree and the entire horizon line of Threats cants wildly. A tale of justified paranoia, shift a bit and the novel resolves into a case study of mental breakdown, then again, and it becomes a tactile wedding of squalor and grief. Even the act of reviewing—attempting to describe the work—feels uncomfortably revelatory: for me the book captured the anguish of losing the one person who kept chaos at bay. David’s life may have been eroding slowly before, but Franny’s death sends the flood roiling, black and ominous, to the rafters. It’s a book of loose ends, frustrations, non sequiturs, Winchester Mansion stairways that end in a blank wall. In short, welcome to life.

Grief is a whirlpool drawing matter and debris unto itself: behold the wreckage. But Gray’s novel implies a larger darkness, too. Death is a black hole pulling meaning, coherence, and plot toward the event horizon, never to be heard from again. That’s a threat any mortal can understand.

Further Links & Resources

• Featherproof Books (whose designer makes us want to pick up everything they put out) published Gray’s collection AM/PM, and they have an excerpt on their site, featherproof.com
• Interested in other mind-expanding work? (Not that kind of mind-expansion, we’re a family show.) Check out Bizarro Fiction, our interview with flash fiction writer Meg Pokrass, and our continued fascination with gaming and lit – here, here, and here, oh, yes – here, too.
• Watch Gray read at the The FSG Reading Series, below:

The FSG Reading Series with Amelia Gray from Farrar, Straus and Giroux on Vimeo.