Threats by Amelia Gray
My rating: 5/5 cats
“we all go a little mad sometimes”
this book kicked my ass. i do not recommend reading it if you have any sort of sad feelings already at work inside of you. or if you are in any way mentally/emotionally compromised. this is not the kind of book you want to find yourself relating to, trust me.
on the purely intellectual level, this is a well-constructed piece of writing that lives in the shadows it creates for itself. it doles out its revelations slowly, like a cerebral detective story, folding back over itself to create dense layers that stick together and dampen so that some of the facts are lost and blurry, and some only survive as fragments, but enough exists to create a chilling story of several characters completely lost in their own loss.
on an emotional level, this book is like getting a novocaine shot in one part of your body, numbing you with a dangerous pleasure, all the while being stabbed repeatedly in a sector of yourself you can feel all too well.
i cared much less about the actual mystery than i did about the rawness of its grief, the richly detailed breakdown of reality that follows a loss. the sense of necessary retreat after a blistering sorrow that is both all-consumingly internalized and seemingly manifests itself to one’s physical surroundings, where rot and decay and paranoia become an external force – depression like an entity, tainting everything.
she perfectly captures the passivity that can occur as a result of grief – retreating into an emotional coma where everything becomes optional and responsibilities just slough away. throw the garbage down the cellar stairs. let the ants climb over your pillow. let the food molder in the fridge. wander all over town in your bathrobe and slippers. get lost in the fog of daydream and hallucination and regret and the narrowing of the scope of future happiness:
David’s mother fantasized about being able to turn doorknobs.
this is what it comes to, in the end.
the inability to communicate, the misunderstandings of a relationship, the failures to prevent something easily avoidable, the horror of hindsight.
The blanket man closed his eye. “I don’t like the color of his jeans or the content of his character,” he said. “I know this is sounding real ‘kids these days,’ but man, kids these days, you know? These guys don’t even talk to their girlfriends anymore. They’ll sit and send them text messages all damn day, but the instant this gorgeous girl walks in and alights next to him like a thick-waist bird of paradise, the guy’s on the damn phone sending the text message. Girl’s all batting the phone outta his hand, ‘come on, Regis,’ got that sweet little pout on. Regis wants to know the score of some damn game that’ll still be there when he’s done laying hands on this girl. Kids these days have no concept of jazz.”
a minor incident in the book, but one that i could not forget, because of all of its implications of what we neglect every day and what we will live to regret in our old age.
the fetishizing of what we are left with.
Hey. Please wash and prep the vegetables before I get home. We’re in a hurry. Sorry. See you.
the things we destroy and never think twice about.
In the kitchen he ate a pear. It occurred to him that, though he had eaten hundreds of pears in the past, if not thousands, this pear was different from every single one he had ever eaten, wholly unique, and, in fact, as he ate it, he was opening parts of the pear that had never been experienced by anyone, human or animal. When his maxillary incisors pierced the skin, which first protected the fruit as it had against rain and sun and then yielded to the invasion, he was oxygenating particles that had never even been open to oxygen. The wet fruit and seeds had existed in darkness for their entire lives until he tore them out with his teeth.
none of these quotations even touch the main focus of the story, which is about a man finding threatening notes scattered throughout his home after the suspicious death of his wife. i really thought this was going to be similar to mr peanut, and there are some points of comparison, but this one did things to me emotionally that were unexpected and only half-resented.
and i never even saw it coming. although i know people who have liked her stuff in the past, i had always assumed she was twee and frivolous, completely judging by her cartoon-y covers and the flash-fictiony nature of am/pm. this book forces me to reconsider my earlier appraisal, and you all know how much i hate changing my ingrained opinions, no matter how unfairly made.
i will reread this. hopefully in a less vulnerable state.
