Head Games
Author: Amelia Gray
One might not expect a novel about a man who loses his grip after (or before, maybe) his wife’s mysterious death to be funny or beautiful, but there was more than one occasion in Threats that Amelia Gray caused me to guffaw or to rest on an image for several beats.
Sometimes, my husband and I play a game in which we say terribly threatening things to one another; the first one to crack a smile loses. The threats Gray’s protagonist, David, begins to find in surprising places after his wife’s death are loaded with the same kind of inherent humor as this game. “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.” This kind of threat, expanded, speaks to the larger tone of the novel: sweet, well-meaning, exploratory, and viscerally creepy.
We are given only David’s remembrance of what happened when Franny came in one day and asked him to call for help. She was stomping berries, or covered in blood, and they laid on the stairs while she took her last breath, or she moved down the street to live with a mirror-image David. The mystery of reality runs deep in these pages, and Shane Jones, author of Light Boxes, nails it when he says, “Reading Amelia Gray is like a pyramid of rocks being built on a cloud.” A weight of seriousness blankets language that is at times completely playful and always rich with imagery:
“That night, Franny and David lay in bed together, immobile from the pleasures of the buffet. She slept, and he examined the muscles twitching under her skin. In those early years, Franny’s body lacked the twin mysteries of scent and softness that had initially allured and eventually drove him from the bedrooms of his few previous girlfriends. His wife’s scent that night was of a wet rock, as if she had been created from the stream that ran behind his childhood home.”
We are taken along for a wild investigation as David and Officer Chico and other characters who are either somewhat normal or astoundingly nuts attempt to piece together the reality of what seems likely to have been Franny’s final hours. Through shifts in perspective and discoveries that are about as illuminating as a bucket of tar, Gray maintains complete control over the chaos, causing the reader to feel completely insane, in a totally sensible fashion. It is this, perhaps, that impresses me most of all.
As striking, though, is Gray’s ability to craft a sex scene to rival the repulsiveness of Errol Childress’ romp with his sister-wife in season one of True Detective, which I did not previously realize was possible. Having read most of Threats either in airports or on a plane, I can only imagine what others made of my facial expressions while roller-coastering through the pages of Gray’s first novel.
In the end, the reader is left without much in the way of answers, but instead of feeling as though there are holes in the narrative, it seems perfectly vague. It leaves just the right amount of riddle in the reader, enough to keep David and Franny on my mind for days of wandering down grocery aisles and standing in line to pay my water bill. Enough to keep wondering about Franny, and to miss her, as David does.
– Brandi Dawn Henderson
- Books to Read for Banned Books Week - September 26, 2014
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