In “Threats,” decay and the accumulation of detritus are dual tolls of human existence. It’s not a coincidence that the two main characters of the book, David and Franny, were employed as a dentist and an aesthetician, respectively. The entirety of “Threats” seems to exist in that unmooring, in which sanity can be ripped up like so many rotten floorboards, exposing how the flooring was probably never very secure in the first place. We find ourselves shucked from the trusted constructions of our identity and reality, left with only the scrolling of our brains, still identifying objects, sensations and smells like some malfunctioning computer.
The firefighter is described as weeping - or is it David? - but Gray suggests that it doesn’t really matter: In emergency situations, disassociation takes over. Instead, Gray anchors the scene in an eerie moment when a female firefighter, clearing away Franny’s corpse, confesses her confusion and grief to David, who takes on her role in pronouncing, “Your wife is dead.” It’s not written just to explain how David’s wife, a healthy young woman, ended up dying in the first place. A few brief chapters after the ashes arrive, a hallucinatory, herky-jerky death scene unfolds with details of Franny’s body decomposing.
The biggest plot point of the book is delivered with enigmatic precision, a narrative oxymoron that Gray nevertheless manages to pull off. Emotions are present in “Threats,” but it’s like they’ve been through a sterilizing wash first. David receives an urn containing his wife’s ashes, and the package is noted for its tape, string and plastic foam but not for the significance of its contents. Those shivering reactions are exactly what Gray wants for her spooky novel, which starts at the high pitch of disturbed atmosphere and mucks around there for all of its nearly 300 pages of clipped, sometimes robotic prose.įrom the first page, the world of “Threats” is clearly off, familiar but drawn in unnervingly detached detail. The woman’s lip twitched at the housefly feeling of the blade caressing her vellus hair.”ĭepending on your tolerance for the minutiae of personal hygiene practices, this ode to a blackhead will either make you want to cover your face with Bioré strips or never cross paths with a magnifying mirror again. Aileen brushed the lancet blade of her extractor over the edge of the woman’s lip with a surgeon’s precise motion. When Aileen birthed it into her metal scoop, the woman sighed with the effort and release of it. “The woman layered the with oil-based makeup, nourishing it, growing it like a seedpod covered by a warm layer of earth.
#BLACKHEAD SIGNPOST ROAD MOVIE#
The description is somewhere between a David Attenborough nature documentary, soft-core pornography and David Cronenberg’s 1986 movie “The Fly.” Here are a few choice lines regarding the blackhead’s existence and its extraction by a skilled facialist: In her bracing debut novel, “Threats,” Los Angeles transplant Amelia Gray writes one of the most gorgeously clinical paragraphs about a blackhead you’ll likely ever read. Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 281 pp., $14 paper
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