Gutshot
Stories
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- USD 9.99
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- USD 9.99
Descripción editorial
A searing new collection from the inimitable Amelia Gray.
A woman creeps through the ductwork of a quiet home. A medical procedure reveals an object of worship. A carnivorous reptile divides and cauterizes a town. Amelia Gray's curio cabinet expands in Gutshot, where isolation and coupling are pushed to their dark and outrageous edges. These singular stories live and breathe on their own, pulsating with energy and humanness and a glorious sense of humor. Hers are stories that you will read and reread—raw gems that burrow into your brain, reminders of just how strange and beautiful our world is. These collected stories come to us like a vivisected body, the whole that is all the more elegant and breathtaking for exploring its most grotesque and intimate lightless viscera.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
