“Here, the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom, and that road is paved with handjobs.”
I’ve found that these FSG Originals are at the very least, always something unique that you might not find published elsewhere. They have the feel of something published by a much smaller press like Tin House, Two Dollar Radio, or Coffee House Press. This means that they’re usually going to be divisive as well. But, when their niche lines up with yours, it’s like a curator personally picking books for you.
With the exception of Ted Chiang, story collections are always going to be a little hit and miss from story to story. At worst Amelia Gray’s stories are uncomfortable and unsettling, with great prose. At best they’re uncomfortable, unsettling, hilarious, disturbing, and moving, with great prose. Great prose is the common denominator.
There are 4-5 really great stories in here, and 1 fantastic one. There are about 30 or so that relied way too much on their gimmick to accomplish anything worthwhile as stories. Think Chuck Palahniuk trying to gross you out, and forgetting to you know, tell a story. But if you’re like me, you’ve already been desensitized to that sort of thing, and you’re un-gross-outable. So you’re just left with no story.
‘Go For It and Raise Hell’ is a high point and you should go read it right now. It reads like a character introduction from The New and Improved Romie Futch, which had fantastic secondary characters. You should go read that book right away. I was also really surprised by ’50 Ways to Eat Your Lover.’ The way it hid the story in the least interesting part of each sentence was brilliant and really snuck up on me. It accomplished so much in 50 sentences. ‘The Swan as Metaphor for Love,’ was another one that really worked for me. It illustrated how from afar something can be much more appealing than the up-close reality.
The stories that are good, are really good. Gray does this thing with her writing, where there’s just a hint of something else going on in each story and the reader has to sort of weed it out for themselves a bit; they have to meet the story halfway. When it works, it really works.
All-in-all this is an uneven collection, but the gems are hidden in here, and the stories are short enough that you can slam one out in a couple minutes flat. I’d say go for it. The good stories are worth digging through the rest.
