On a personal note: when I read Threats, Amelia Gray’s extraordinary debut novel, I had a full week of the strangest dreams I’ve ever experienced. There were whales with the distended faces of my elementary school teachers, a pack of weevils living a Winesburg, OH kind of existence in a village made of my teeth, and a particularly harrowing night where a squadron of our former presidents (Taylor, Polk, Taft, and the oft-forgotten Filmore) chased me around the Library of Congress with muskets. At the time, I hardly suspected the cause to be the floral-covered paperback that sat innocently on my nightstand, and it was not until I began to write this review that the pieces fell into place. But this is the mark of the strange, disorienting force of Gray’s novel: there are books that you possess, and books that possess you. Clearly, Threats is the latter.
