Excerpt: ‘Threats’

When promising authors deliver promising debuts, we like to bring attention to it. In Threats, short-story author Amelia Gray delivers an “old-fashioned gothic tale as rewritten by David Lynch or Williams S. Burroughs,” according to our review.

Read more new and notable fiction this March.

David’s wife suffered a violent death in their own home, due to the wounds found on her body, and now this former dentist is under intense scrutiny as to whodunit. As the mystery unravels, and he starts to grow more and more paranoid, he receives threatening message on scraps of paper throughout their house. Although there are some missteps along the way (see our review), overall, we said the book was “a striking debut novel from a writer eager to shake domestic fiction out of its comfort zone.”

Here, an excerpt from this promising young author:

FRANNY had never faulted him his confusions. Once, a group of squabbling jays stopped them on a walk. Two of the birds were circling each other, ducking and weaving, thrusting beak to wing, falling back. The group around that central pair collectively made a noise like rushing water. They spread their blue wings. It looked like someone had dropped a scarf on the ground. They moved in a unified line around the fighters in the center.

She took his hand. “You’re in the road,” she said.

He knew he had found a good woman in Franny. After only a few months of movie dates, they announced their engagement. The two of them took David’s father out to dinner and told him as the main course arrived. David’s father thought about how tall Franny was, how much taller she was than his son. Even with the two of them sitting across the table from him, he could see the fi ne, straight lines of Franny’s spine holding her higher than his poor thirty- year-old son, balding young, who scrabbled after a piece of meat with one side of his fork. Franny seemed stronger and older and smarter than his boy. She used her butter knife to push the errant cube of steak onto David’s probing fork without breaking eye contact with David’s father. Still, David’s father thought, marry a straight spine and she’ll grow into a walking stick.

David’s regular patients asked the most questions. There were his childhood friends, Samson and the other one, the one whose name David could never remember even when he held the man’s file, a file containing a near lifetime of dental history, on his lap. David kept in contact with his old friends over time because they came in yearly for checkups. They usually spoke of the small success and general failure of local sports. The hygienists were the ones who had let the engagement news slip, and then David was cajoled into producing a picture of his future bride, and then everyone asked about her grip strength and cooking skill, and if she could help them move a dinner table to a third-floor apartment.

The questions they asked were forward but mostly not impolite.

One of his patients who worked in the art department at the local community college asked if Franny could stand for his life-drawing class, speculating that her anatomy would lend itself to easier visual interpretation.

“She’s massive,” said an uncle on his father’s side, who came in from the country every few years for his teeth and had received an e-mail from the hygienists that included an image attachment. “I mean that kindly,” he said, insisting it over the sound of applied suction.

David knew that his family and his patients were only trying to piece together the physical mystery of Franny. The truth was that he had always felt he was an average-size man until he met her and realized how small he truly was. He appreciated the perspective.