Threats A Novel

by Gray, Amelia

• ISBN13: 9780374533076
• ISBN10: 0374533075
• Edition: Original
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-02-28
• Publisher: FSG Originals

Summary

A blazingly original electrifying mystery of love and loss from the haunted imagination of Amelia Gray In the dead of winter, David, a retired dentist in an unnamed town in Ohio, is pretty sure his wife, Franny, is dead. But he can't quite figure out what killed her or why she had to die. Disoriented by grief, David struggles to unravel these mysterieswhich become increasingly baffling when he starts finding a series of elaborate and escalating threats hidden around his home. I will gather your oldest friends at my home and we will have a conversation. you will hear us talking but when you come into the room we will stop talking. Who left these notes? Was someone out to get Franny? Are they coming for him? I will staple my address to your winter coat, little one. they will send you to me no matter what you claim. Unfortunately for David, Detective Chico is also on the case and is intent on asking him questions that he doesn't know the answers to and introducing him to people including a therapist who is practicing dream analysis in David's garage without his knowledge or consentwho don't appear to have David's best interests in mind. With no one to trust, David is forced to rely on his own memories and faculties, but they, too, are proving unreliable. Curl up on my lap. let me brush your hair with my fingers. i am singing you a lullaby. I am testing for structural weakness in your skull. Full of psychological twists and turns, Threatsbeautifully balances moments of utter bewilderment and perfect clarity. Amelia Gray builds a world around the reader that is eerie yet familiar, violent yet tender. With ability and precision far beyond her years, Gray grabs you on the first page and never loosens her grip. A blazingly original, electrifying mystery of love and loss from the haunted imagination of Amelia Gray

Author Biography

AMELIA GRAY grew up in Tucson, Arizona. Her first collection of stories, AM/PM, was published in 2009. Her second collection, Museum of the Weird, was awarded the Ronald Sukenick/American Book Review Innovative Fiction Prize. She lives in Los Angeles. THREATS is her first novel.

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Table of Contents

“Amelia Gray is a sharpshooter, precise and deadly. THREATS lures the reader with its poetic sensibilities and then subverts every expectation. Before long, there will be statues of Gray in various corners of the literary world.” —Emma Straub, author of Other People We Married

“Reading Amelia Gray is like a pyramid of rocks being built on a cloud. That’s to say, it’s something fantastical, dreamlike, playful, and very dangerous. You will be amazed at what this writer can do.” —Shane Jones, author of Light Boxes

“The first time I encountered Amelia Gray’s fiction, it slugged me in the jaw. The second time too, and the third. Said jaw-slugging has ensued nearly every time I’ve read something of hers, except for when instead it whispered sad and surprising but undeniable truths about the difficulty of intimacy and sense in the wretched blastoscape of modern life. And then it made me a grilled cheese sandwich to prove that the world can be a kind place, and it waited until I had sated myself and wiped away the crumbs before slugging me in the jaw again.” —Doug Dorst, author of The Surf Guru and Alive in Necropolis

Excerpts

1.

 
THE TAPE ON THE PACKAGE was striped with waxed string. David dug his fingernails underneath the perimeter of the tape and clawed at it. He didn’t want to go to the kitchen for a knife, and he spent an extra piece of time examining the entire package to find the loose end that could be pulled up. Inside the package was a Styrofoam carton, sealed with another kind of thick tape. A receipt was attached to the top of the lid, noting a cremation charge of $795, a box charge of $25, and a shipping charge of $20.95.
The package measured a few feet square. It was pockmarked with red stickers printed with the image of a broken wineglass. The return address was of a funeral home in town. David placed the package on the coffee table between Franny’s cooking magazines and a stack of old newspapers. Some of the crosswords in the newspapers had been completed weeks earlier, perhaps months. Franny would read the news, and David would complete the crosswords. David took the newspapers into the basement and stacked them in a far corner.

 
Copyright © 2012 by Amelia Gray