“Threats” by Amelia Gray (reviewed by Patrick Totti)

Threats, Amelia Gray’s third offering, and first novel, is her most ambitious work yet. The title, released by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in late February, marks a decided turn in the young female novelist’s already burgeoning career. Already know for her inventive, distinctive voice Gray’s latest book sees her stepping up to tackle the novel form. Her previous two works, AM/PM and Museum of the Weird were a collective breath of fresh air for the short form, showing just how far a story can delve linguistically and resonate emotionally.

The cover design of Threats, done by Charlotte Strick, is gorgeous, producing both a beauty and grittiness that is manifested within the text. The novel itself is separated into 77 mini chapters, the majority of which are only a few pages in length. This construction produces much the same feeling I had when reading her story collections as each chapter stood on its own as a miniature narrative or, as I found them, hyper scenes.

Told in the third person, Threats centers around David and his wife Franny, or more precisely, David dealing with Franny’s death. The majority of the book deals with grief and identity, loss and recovery. At its core it’s a meditation on the grieving process. But it’s the emergence of odd, threatening messages that begin to appear around the house that provides the kindling for this avant-gothic tale. Set in an unnamed Ohio town the mood is bleak, almost on the verge of individual emotional dystopian levels but Gray manages to balance the narration so as not to over indulge in Gary’s loss.

David’s character, at first, comes off as mentally unstable only to, as the novel progresses, develop into a nuanced personality, fraught with a fractured sense of self and a growing sense of paranoia due to the messages.

In her usual deadpan and subtle ways, Gray weaves a tale that is at times heartbreakingly honest and wildly absurd. It’s once again a testament to her temperance, and skill, as an author that she manages to balance the two, almost willing them together from opposite ends of the spectrum to create an effect that can only be described as silent wonder. I was left with this books presence in the days after reading. Scenes popped up in my head, clues rehashed, passages reanalyzed. That’s what I suspect I liked most about this book: it’s lingering effect.

Eerie and foggy in mood throughout, he messages were the most paralyzing. “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.” These messages, sprinkled intermittently, grounded the text in a level of mystery that, despite David’s best efforts, could never quite be uncovered.

I felt as though I was being taken for a crazy ride with little knowledge of the driver, but every so often as the car seems to be out of control around a corner, doomed to crash, the driver rights the car and I settle in for a few more miles of steady road ahead.

As much as I grew to empathize with David I did, however, find something lacking in the assorted minor characters shared quality, namely being their idiosyncrasies. Whether it was the Detective Chico, Marie the psychiatrist, or Aileen from Franny’s salon, these minor players’ assorted strangeness came off, at times, as a bit much and once in a while overshadowed David’s mental anguish.

A particular part, early on, that shone through, giving a hint of the quality to come, was the scene when a female firefighter informs David that his wife is dead. Instead of a simple dialogue driven scene, Gray pivots quickly and has David experience the news from her point of view.

In many ways this novel was contained in an insular world of loss, fractured states of mind, and differing levels of remembrance. But some of the more emotionally charged scenes are where David is trapped, mentally, recounting memories of his wife, unable to let go completely. The world created is somehow different, at times unfeeling and static but this only reinforces the moments of clarity, mostly through David’s observations, that permeate the story.

The book’s somewhat ambiguous ending is the perfect, and I suspect, only way to culminate this tale whose main driving force throughout was the murky waters of ambiguity and shadow; both real and imagined. A must read for fans of Gray’s prior work, just have a pen handy as you’re going to want to underline the hell out of this book with all of it’s one line gems.