“[David] descends the spirals of grief after losing his wife… With death and decay quite literally pervading his house and life, David finds himself both terrified by his situation yet drawn towards some obscure peace with it, as if giving in to a dark and fungal siren”

Amelia Gray is back with her third collection of short stories, Gutshot. As the title suggests, this is an uncomfortable book. Like, being-shot-square-in-the-guts level uncomfortable. There’s a man who vomits every time he speaks (and carries an empty pop bottle for convenience), mutual genital mutilation between a couple struggling to conceive a child, a family who carve up an over-sized heart with kitchen knives. There are giant snakes and desecrated graveyards and twins within twins. And yes, there is blood and shit and mucus in large quantities. 

As in Threats, many of the characters in Gutshot seem aware of their situation but unable to change, as if passengers on a train called Life or Destiny which they understand will arrive at its destination regardless of anything they might do. These are people caught in a strange stases, pervaded by vague sensations they can see and feel but not avoid, sensations which eat away at their insides until they are hulled and hollow. Opener ‘In The Moment’ is a good example, a story where a couple eradicate all references of the past or future from their apartment, removing all context from their existence and thus making life at once fascinating and impossible. See also ‘Away From’, the tale of a kidnapped woman who freezes at the top of the stairs when trying to escape. Reading these stories is like watching a fungus bloom across a wall, like watching a slow-motion video of yourself going up in flames.

This feeling hangs over the majority of the stories, even those in which the characters are decisive. Even ‘The Labyrinth’, which sees a not-so-brave man decide to be brave teeters toward a cryptic ending, or rather ends cryptically before any real conclusion. This is typical Gray, never quite giving the reader that satisfying click of recognition, the realisation of where a story is going or what it means. Good people aren’t rewarded and bad people aren’t punished and even passages that first appear clear allegories or fables skew into confusion. In ‘The Labyrinth’, the narrator, Jim, is forced to carry an (heavy) enigmatic disk through the maze:

“I don’t know about this,” I said.

“It’s the Phiastos Disk,” Dale said. “I paid a pretty penny so mind where you set it.”

It did seem to be imbued with some significance.

And so Jim takes the disk into the labyrinth without ever understanding why. Gray’s grotesque imagery is much the same. It remains important, vital, to her work without serving any clear function (ie. any ham-fisted metaphorical purpose), as if its meaning is so large it’s impossible to focus on. ‘Year of the Snake’ is set up like a strange and ambiguous fairy tale that never narrows down to some moral principle, while ‘The Swan as Metaphor for Love’ begins like an amusing love-is-actually-terrible gag before subverting the subversion, delving so far into horrible, biological truths that you’re left with an existential consideration so primal it registers as a taste in the mouth.

I could go on: ‘Device,’ ‘These Are Fables’ and the title story all seem to tee up some valuable punchline without following through, highlighting something that makes Gray’s writing so special. By not giving answers, or sending explicit messages, she manages to create characters and situations which feel real despite their surreality. Whether they have a device which can predict the future, an unending compulsion to say thank you or a prostitute locked in the heating ducts of their home, each and every character is vividly, fatally, human.

To review the collection as a whole is a difficult job. The book reads like a carefully constructed chaos too nuanced to be unified into a clear theme. Occasionally an image or theme is amplified by what seems like inadvertent recurrence, while other times they clash messily leaving once-clear messages and morals adrift in ambiguity. This gives Gray’s design an decidedly organic feel, each piece, ignorant of the rest, fulfils its own role as if it is the most important thing in the world, creating a system of blind parts working furiously toward some obscure goal, and giving Fernando Vicente‘s artwork a whole new meaning.

Gutshot is out now, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Seeing as we are primarily a music website, we thought we’d included a playlist of songs to accompany each book review. The tracks aren’t necessarily directly related to the anything in the stories, but rather get close to the same sorts of imagery and moods. Enjoy.

The post Amelia Gray – Gutshot appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Nearly three years after Home (a stint in which some of the band played as Bummer), Young Jesus announced a new album and unveiled a brand new single, ‘G’, a song which prompted us to say:

“I don’t want to write too much based on one single, but this seems to be going a step further than your standard indie-rock fare”

As hinted above, we were predisposed to hold this opinion. Home left us with some pretty high expectations for the band, in particular their writing and lead John Rossiter’s delivery. ‘G’ and the album trailer (see below) merely confirmed our suspicions. After spending some time with the full-length, it’s safe to safe that these feelings were justified.

Just as with Home, Grow / Decompose is not a traditional eleven-songs-with-three-singles record, but neither is it a full concept album. It’s something between the two, pinned together by a set of central themes and characters whilst escaping the pitfalls and constraints of a “concept album”. For this reason the album is reminiscent of Craig Finn’s writing, which to me is high praise indeed. The word ‘novelistic’ would come close if only Grow / Decompose didn’t bring to mind the very novels which play with the conventions of the form. Our preview mentioned David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest as a comparison and this seems to reach far further than the shared transvestic tendencies (of G / D’s Neil and IJ’s Tony Krause) cited as reasoning. Not only does the album have the same broad, scattered and vaguely cyclical structure as the novel, but Young Jesus’ music also shares Wallace’s metamodern style – a postmodern web of motifs and strange humour countered with a modernist sincerity and genuine sense of hope.

It’s not only in structure that Grow / Decompose brings to mind Infinite Jest. Their juxtaposition of bleak mental turmoil with buoyant (or at least fervent) emotion and hope is integral to the Young Jesus aesthetic. Again a parallel to The Hold Steady’s style, this combination provides a sense of depth that would be absent from something aligned purely to misery or joy. This makes the album, at least to my ears, very much a product of the twenty-first century. We aren’t always sad, or always happy, or always good or evil or apathetic or nihilistic or idealistic to the point of stupidity. We are all of these things and none of them and it can be hard work trying to fathom how to retain a sense of self while being in such a state of confusion. What I’m getting at is, like Infinite Jest, Grow / Decompose resists the temptation of satire and cynicism to paint real people stuck in this madness.

As the title describes so neatly, Grow / Decompose speaks of the familiar paths that human lives follow. Despite all the strangeness, the characters here are going through the age-old problems – depression, anxiety, identity crises, existential terror – the problems of being You and You alone, Molina’s “curse of a human’s life”. For all of the complexity of our existence, we are still locked in the atavistic pattern of life and death, everyone more or less condemned to the same mistakes and fears and joys that we as human beings have been experiencing for generations (“You don’t start clean,” tells the refrain of ‘Brothers’, “spines are twisting in the rings. This old tree, been around before you were born”). In this way the album is both pessimistic and hopeful, a statement that we seem unable to change for the better and a reminder that we are united by this monumental whammy. As Rossiter sings on ‘Oranges’: “She’s a believer in the relief / that we’re all receivers of suffering”.

Degeneration is a major theme and the whole record is imbued with an odd pleasure/pain relationship, accentuated with grotesque imagery. Take for example opener ‘EMP’: “So go ahead and search your chest, the slugs and inchworms know it best.” This brought to mind the book Threats by Amelia Gray, in which a man named David descends the spirals of grief after losing his wife. With death and decay quite literally pervading his house and life, David finds himself both terrified by his situation yet drawn towards some obscure peace with it, as if giving in to a dark and fungal siren. The characters on Grow / Decompose are similarly troubled and lonely, be they confused and unhappy with their identity (‘G’), saddled with unwanted children and gripped by overwhelming numbness (‘Oranges’) or using drugs and forming half-imagined relationships with television presenters (‘Slug’ and ‘Brothers’). Dissociated from others, they achieve the sort of heightened peculiarity of southern gothic hermits, existing within the confines of their own logic and physics, a world where the hope or possibility of connection or meaning flutters along rarely, staccato and unannounced.

The result is a manic-depressive relationship with their irregularity. On ‘Blood and Guts’ the character holds his weirdness aloft like a banner intended to confirm himself or terrify others, marching towards epiphany or entropy like Gray’s David. The title character in ‘Milo’, who sits somewhere near McCarthy’s Lester Ballard on the scale of Southern Gothic hermits, continues the perverse pleasure with the clear-eyed conviction of a serial killer, delighted by the gory truths of life and death. Milo is the depraved character, one who seems to have pushed past anxiety and apathy to realise his potential as a monster (“He paints his face and feels a brightness / glowing brighter inside / the cave he built out of the thorax / of the organist’s hide”). With his humanity stripped away he becomes a prophet who “sings the world as it’s shown”, the cyclical, elemental theme returning with its closing chant:

“All the birds singing
all the plants growing
all the wind blowing
all the bugs crawling
all the birds breaking
all the plants dying
all the wind crawling
and the blood flowing
and the waves breaking
with the birds singing
and the plants speaking
to the wind dying”

It seems important that the end of the final track ‘Dirt’ shares the same chords and drone as the opener, so that the end loops back to the beginning (another similarity to Infinite Jest). If played on repeat Grow / Decompose never ends, a musical ouroboros of well-worn paths that are both doomed and blessed and quite possibly all we have.

Grow / Decompose is out on the 13^th May via Hellhole Supermarket and you can pre-order buy it now on CD and cassette, or on vinyl via Gigantic Noise.

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