Threats

Product Description


[This is the Audiobook CD Library Edition in vinyl case.]

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 mysteries--which 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 consent--who 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,
Threats beautifully balances moments of utter bewilderment and perfect clarity. Amelia Gray builds a world 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.


Review


''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
Alive in Necropolis

''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

''Gradually, as with any good detective novel, the pieces come together. What would have seemed gimmicky in the hands of a less skilled writer becomes a cunning whodunit with Gray at the reins . . . An innovative debut novel.'' --
Publishers Weekly


About the Author


AMELIA GRAY grew up in Tucson, Arizona, and received her MFA from Texas State University. Her first collection of stories,
AM/PM, was published in 2009. Her second collection,
Museum of the Weird, was selected for the Ronald Sukenick American Book Review Prize for Innovative Fiction 2010. She lives in Austin, Texas.
Threats is her first novel.