Amelia Gray understands horror. Not the B-movie hack-and-slash or cheap psychological twist, but a deeply unsettling perversion of the Known. Not to say that elements of body horror don’t exist within Gray’s third short story collection, GUTSHOT: “Fifty Ways to Eat Your Lover” illustrates the emotional consumption of a failed relationship through an array of grotesque body mutilations; the aptly titled “Viscera” draws connections between the stories we read and the bodily excretions we leave on the paper they’re printed on; and “Heart” features a family trying to get rid of the heart of (supposedly) a blue whale by hacking it into pieces.

Gray takes the obvious hallmarks of the genre --- the guts, the terror, and the purely kinetic energy of violence --- and abstracts them. Vomit becomes a link between two lost souls. A fetal resorption swallows the world around her. Men and women dismember their own bodies in an orgiastic celebration of life. In the worlds that Gray creates, these are typical events --- events that run the gamut of emotions and tones.

"These stories are intense bursts of humanity filtered through a surrealist lens. There is no banal obsession over the moment a life went wrong, no literary bluster bloating the pages. They are lean, expertly cut down to deliver their conclusions, and leave the reader to discover the rest."

While GUTSHOT is never a comfortable read, the emotional depth of these stories prevents them from being easily categorized as just horror or literary fiction or, occasionally, satire. 

This isn’t simply a collection of spooky and grotesque stories. Gray is a master at imbuing humor in the most unlikely of places, such as when a woman’s dead mother possesses her pimple and interjects (in all caps, because of course she speaks in all caps) at any moment she sees fit. Jesus appears to a fatally wounded man to express his displeasure of having his name taken in vain. A father-to-be lists all the reasons he shouldn’t have children, including his addictions to heroin, keno and tattoos, and his refusal to eat vegetables.

It’s one thing to watch a movie or read a book and be thrown into disruption along with a character; it’s quite another to experience the surreal on its own terms with no shared experiences. “These are the fables we will tell our children,” Gray writes, and it rings true for each story in this collection. These stories bare closer relation to the fable than the modern incarnation of the short story.

These stories are intense bursts of humanity filtered through a surrealist lens. There is no banal obsession over the moment a life went wrong, no literary bluster bloating the pages. They are lean, expertly cut down to deliver their conclusions, and leave the reader to discover the rest.

There is terror, sex, humor and even hope, but they all feel a bit beside the point. Not in the sense that they are unnecessary, but that their purpose is to make palatable the truths we try to ignore, truths that would seem too obvious or emotionally estranged if said outright. There is a deeper magic at work here, some primordial instinct that propels the characters of GUTSHOT to the extremes of action and thought.