Book Review: Threats by Amelia Gray
“an experience in which all phenomena and every character is questionable”
Review by Reyna Kohl
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David's wife, Franny, has died with bloody feet and several small pieces of crumpled paper in her stomach. She has died on the back stoop of the house where she and David lived. Days later, David is found sleeping on the stoop next to his wife's decaying body.
David comes to, utterly confused, as Franny's corpse is being taken away. The police and people around town begin to wonder. And inquire. And intrude. David begins to wonder. Reality twists around and bites David in the ass.
Amelia Gray's Threats is an unsolvable mystery. It is a test of the trust we have in our own perception; an experience in which all phenomena and every character is questionable.
One of the loveliest aspects of Gray's debut novel is the dream-like quality that imbues every scene, backed up against the acute detail which makes everything terribly real. Herein lies the duality of Threats: This is a story that seems made up of phantasmagoria, but Gray writes incredible lucidity into the view of the supposed somnambulist.
The images that Gray's prose brings vividly to mind are not unlike those from a Sylvain Chomet film (The Old Lady and the Pigeons, for example); so bizarre that you want to laugh, but so unnervingly surreal that you keep quiet, checking your back from time to time, expecting an exaggeratedly-long and bony finger ready to tap you on the shoulder.
“I AM CURRENTLY COLLECTING YOUR BONE MARROW. IT IS GOING INTO A BAG. I AM GOING TO SELL IT.”
Her words are outside your window, waiting, so when you look up you think you can make out a figure in the dark, just beyond where your eyes can focus. They are things you didn't know were happening in some other room inside your own house.
“I WILL CROSS-STITCH AN IMAGE OF YOUR FUTURE HOME BURNING. I WILL HANG THIS IMAGE OVER YOUR BED WHILE YOU SLEEP.”
If you are susceptible, Threats may induce paranoia.
David is being watched, his front door has been electrified, an unlicensed hypnotherapist lives in his hornet-infested shed, his near-identical double lives a couple of houses down with a woman who appears to be his late wife. His deceased wife has been seen around town. He finds secret messages everywhere. All of this seems relevant. He just wants to know what it all means.
There are epic journeys on public transportation, meaningful interactions in the laundromat, and so many poetic hand-typed clues that answer nothing. Fists full of things that should piece together to form a plausible chain-of-events, instead float around in the world that Gray has created, never touching. Or colliding, but not clicking.
David stumbles out into the mess that had been bled out by this tragedy and his own grief, still asleep; on the edge of something from which he is in danger of falling. He may have always been there, swaying back and forth, trying to stay with Franny, trying to pluck what he could of her from the air. Perhaps, at one time, Franny had been the one keeping him from going over. But she was gone.
“Franny had never faulted him his confusions. Once, a group of squabbling jays stopped them on a walk. Two of the birds were circling each other, ducking and weaving, thrusting beak to wing, falling back. The group around that central pair collectively made a noise like rushing water. They spread their blue wings. It looked like someone had dropped a scarf on the ground. They moved in a unified line around the fighters in the center.
She took his hand. 'You're in the road,' she said.”
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