Gutshot: Stories [Paperback]

A woman creeps through the ductwork of a quiet home. A medical procedure reveals an object of worship. A carnivorous reptile divides and cauterizes a town. Amelia Gray's curio cabinet expands inGutshot, where isolation and coupling are pushed to their dark and outrageous edges. A master of the macabre, Gray's work is not for the faint of heart or gut: lick at your own risk.

???ReadingGutshotis a little like being blindfolded and pelted from all sides with fire, Jell-O and the occasional live animal. You'll be messy at the end and slightly beaten up, but surprised and certainly entertained . . . She pushes against the outer limits of what humans can and will do. She seems to be testing her readers, too. Will you come with me here? How about if I take it a little further? Are you still game???? ???Ramona Ausubel,The New York Times Book Review

???Amelia Gray sounds like no one else. Her writing is by turns horrifying, funny, sexy and grotesque, but woe be to those who want to pin it down as horror, comedy, romance or fantasy. Sentence by sentence, these stories are simple, rarely complicated by rhetorical flourishes or formal experimentation, but the scenes they build can be deeply complex - and the emotions they summon often contradictory, too. And, at the beating heart of it all, Gray's on a quest to reclaim the body's rightful place in literature - the clumsy, bloody, inconvenient body, which so often gets left behind in high-minded drama . . . By baring a bit of blood to the world, she reminds readers we're blood-bearing creatures after all, not just selves but bodies with beating hearts.??? ???Colin Dwyer,NPR

???Viscerally wicked.??? ???Natalie Beach,O, The Oprah Magazine

???The 38 stories inGutshotmay be short, but they're also downright haunting. Gray's characters are often dark, awkward, and funny--a serial vomiter, unlikely conjoined twins--and lurking through desolate landscapes, finlă•