Gutshot

Starred review from February 23, 2015
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. Agent: Claudia Ballard, WME Entertainment.

February 15, 2015
The minute details of life are memorably rendered in surreal and sometimes grotesque ways. Many of the stories in this collection are set in a formerly familiar corner of the world that's been turned on its head. "It was my idea to rent the girl," writes the narrator of "House Heart," and the story that follows takes familiar elements and pushes them toward an eerie, transgressive place. A couple living in a space that was once "the preparation wing of a garment factory" rents a young woman for a game called House Heart, in which the threat of violence looms and the industrial remains of the residence become hiding spaces. This is Gray's fourth book (and third story collection), and it features the widest stylistic range of any of her books to date. Its predecessor, the novel Threats (2012), blended surreal imagery with questions of crime, violence and perception. Here, Gray combines those aspects of Threats with the concise and sometimes-absurdist tendencies that characterized her earlier collections. The irreverent "Go for It and Raise Hell" is metafiction walking into a bar for an unheard-of bender, while "Year of the Snake" begins as a riff on folk tales and shifts gears into something stranger, laced with body horror. There's also a grim, bittersweet comedy that comes to the forefront in stories such as "Device," in which a scientist creates a device that predicts the future; after two decidedly specific predictions, the inventor asks it what his future spouse will be like. " 'Skin, hair.' The device buzzed lightly. 'Fingernails.' " The response is both comic, with the machine eventually enveloped in a fit of pastoral reverie, and emotionally harrowing. The best of Gray's stories find that balance between devastation and humor and navigate an uneasy territory with agility; in this book, there are many that reach that mark.

April 1, 2015

Gray won the Ronald Sukenick/American Book Review Innovative Fiction Prize for a previous collection, Museum of the Weird, which is certainly appropriate. Her stories, though starting out simply and told in polished, straightforward language, immediately turn edgy, disturbing, and even downright weird. Two men imprison a young woman they've hired in a large industrial vent, for instance, while townsfolk cleaning a graveyard end up attacking a gravestone. VERDICT Great for readers who like fiction that straddles the literary/horror divide (or simply the literary/way-out-there divide).

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 15, 2015
In Gray's (Threats, 2012) latest unique, punchy collection, she melds the inexplicable with everyday realities. In Year of the Snake, a large reptile divides a small town into North Snake and South Snake, and a local scientist turns an unusual discovery into a booming business. In House Heart, two lovers rent the services of a young woman and then enclose her inside the home's air ducts. Western Passages follows a narrator who befriends a young woman on a bus, determined to protect her from a leering passenger. Gray's bountiful five-part collection incorporates tales and vignettes both absorbing and unconventional: gods hold a yearly contest in which the winner (whoever can feel the most grief) is reunited with a lost loved one; a deceased mother's voice begins to emanate from her daughter's pimple; young twins place a curse on their mother; Fifty Ways to Eat Your Lover is a how-to list. While eccentricities are on display, Gray's stories also deftly capture the startling moments when her characters pull off their armor and reveal their genuine selves.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)