“You lose everything you love in the order in which you love it.”

Amelia Gray’s novel Threats is as unnerving and threatening as the title suggests. Threats is like a strange and uneven puzzle where you find a new piece when you didn’t know you were missing any. As information is revealed, falsified, reconsidered and reformulated, we readjust as readers within short spans of time and space.

A basic synopsis:

On a winter night,Franny walks out of the house where her and her husband, David, live wearing nothing but her pajamas. She freezes to death with a handful of berries in her fist and even more in her stomach. David has trouble coping after her death and is continually visited by police and therapists who claim to have his best interests at heart. He is an ex-dentist and his narrative voice often flashes back to past events.

Shortly after Franny’s death, David has a number of out of body experiences where he sees the situation through the eyes of other characters. This helped to ground me in a narrative where nothing was certain.

Franny’s death doesn’t come as a great shock to him. What shocks him is the threatening notes he finds left around the house after her death. For example: CURL UP ON MY LAP. LET ME BRUSH YOUR HAIR WITH MY FINGERS. I AM SINGING YOU A LULLABY. I AM TESTING FOR STRUCTURAL WEAKNESS IN YOUR SKULL or I WILL LOCK YOU IN A ROOM MUCH LIKE YOUR OWN UNTIL IT BEGINS TO FILL WITH WATER. Other threats involve nails through feet, poison, and other forms of torture. David also discovers a horde of journalists outside his house, all curious about the his wife he may have killed, but most shocking to David is that one of the journalists has moved into his garage. The lines between fact and fiction are blurred so that David doesn’t know what/who is real and what/who isn’t. The one thing we know for sure is that the notes are real. One of Franny’s old work friends finds a note addressed to herself in a coffee cup.

Overall, this book is unsettling and narratively unique. If you want a read with a strong sense of plot and pace, this novel may not be for you. If you’re interested in long unstable character study, this book might be perfect.