Gutshot

Book excerpt: “A bizarre and darkly funny world . . . There are fables, horror stories, absurd stories, and more serious stories about love.” —Ramona Ausubel, The New York Times Book Review 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 in Gutshot, where isolation and coupling are pushed to their dark and outrageous edges. These singular stories live and breathe on their own, pulsating with energy and humanness and a glorious sense of humor. Hers are stories that you will read and reread—raw gems that burrow into your brain, reminders of just how strange and beautiful our world is. These collected stories come to us like a vivisected body, the whole that is all the more elegant and breathtaking for exploring its most grotesque and intimate lightless viscera. “Exhilarating and violently creative, these stories are an assault on expectation. Gutshot is a rare, new original, and Amelia Gray is her own startling genre. This is a book to be experienced, to be taught and obsessed over, to live as a prized weapon on your bookshelf.” —Alissa Nutting, author of Tampa “Gutshot is a wild journey through the singular imagination of Amelia Gray, one of the most ambitious and relentlessly inventive writers of our time. The worlds Gray conjures are gorgeous and gruesome and devastating and stone-cold hilarious—but more than anything, these stories are as fearless and original as they come.” —Laura van den Berg, author of State of Paradise “Viscerally wicked.” —Natalie Beach, O, The Oprah Magazine