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Book Fight Club: Threats

August 14, 2012 in Wordsmoker Book Club

Hello! Hello! It is time for Book Fight Club. Tonight we are discussing Threats by Amelia Gray. Are you ready to rumble?

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  • Wenceslao_Moreno

    Well, this got all fucked up, with this Disqus shit, didn’t it now?

  • notwavingbutdrowning

    Anyone here yet?

  • Belltolls

    I just want to make it clear that Amelia Gray never threatened me…directly.

    • Va Quero

      How do you have an icon?

  • Va Quero

    I’m here!

  • Va Quero

    And comments go backwards. Okay.

  • Wenceslao_Moreno

    Well, I guess I’m here, but I am grumpy.

    • viruswithshoes

      Hahahaha

  • Va Quero

    How do you have an image, Bell?

    • Wenceslao_Moreno

      Because he’s a bastard.

      • Va Quero

        hahahahaha True.

    • viruswithshoes

      You can upload one by clicking on the thing I mentioned above.

  • notwavingbutdrowning

    The book did make me anxious at times.

  • Va Quero

    I was going to make a Barbie movie but didn’t get to it. I might still make it, though.

  • Va Quero

    I liked the book. I did. There were things that bugged me. Like the threats weren’t actual threats, more like pronouncements.

  • Va Quero

    I liked the poetic quality of the threats too. And the odd sanity of it all. How off kilter everything was. That constant dream state or state of shock. As if they were both in a constant state of shock for years before and then suring. I think my favorite scene was him finding all the buried socks.

    • Wenceslao_Moreno

      It got a little too poetic those three or four ALL CAPS pages at the end. Were those the fake psychologist’s notes? Or what?

  • Va Quero

    Am I here alone?

    • Wenceslao_Moreno

      People are getting their sea legs in this stupid commenting system, and it’s annoying.

      • Va Quero

        I refreshed and only the first two comments showed. Everything else disappeared.

  • notwavingbutdrowning

    No. I AM WITH YOU.

  • notwavingbutdrowning

    It was haunting. I liked that. I like the surrealistic quality to it. The trance therapist who lives with wasps. You are right — finding the socks was a great scene.

  • Belltolls

    Gahhhhhhhhhhhhhh+!

  • notwavingbutdrowning

    I liked the way that the house was disintegrating along with its inhabitants.

  • Wenceslao_Moreno

    I was annoyed that the dreamlike state was taken further from the dude’s point-of-view, and it turned out everybody else was same crazy pants, too. So…grief in his head, or no? Land of weirdos, or no? If it wasn’t all just in his head, then, fine, whatever, what’s the fucking point Amelia? (Something about Amelia.)

    • Wenceslao_Moreno

      Nice writing, though.

      • Belltolls

        Yeah. She is okay. It’s going to make one fucked up movie though. Sometimes I thought I was reading The Lovely Bones crossed with a Thom Jones short story.

  • Belltolls

    Was it the fucking red berries or not? That’s all I want to know. I will save my comments about the objective correlative and experimental fiction if it was the fucking red berries. Whats with all the sticking objects in the mouth by the characters too. What’s that about? Berries? Red?

    • Wenceslao_Moreno

      And did she die, or did she just fucking leave him for a guy a lot like him, the way people do?

      • Va Quero

        hahahahaha I don’t know, but I thought she cut her own throat. No?

        • Belltolls

          I missed the throat cutting. How did she vomit though in the opening scene with her throat cut? Details.

          • Wenceslao_Moreno

            Yeah, I thought vomiting blood. But by the end I wasn’t sure if he’d actually sat there with her decaying corpse for days or not.

          • Belltolls

            I think she ate the red berries. It ruptured her stomach lining and then she died because David wouldn’t call the fire department. Such a mundane, hippie-ish thing to do and it destroyed them. I think I am projecting here.

          • Wenceslao_Moreno

            She did tell him not to bother. He was sort of a passive dude.

          • Belltolls

            She did. He was just following orders.

  • notwavingbutdrowning

    There was a sinister element to it — the legacy of the mother killing her daughter. It made you think that there was a part of this that was real — not just psychological.

  • notwavingbutdrowning

    Wences — yes — I was disappointed when the craziness started spreading to the other characters. Then you couldn’t see it as just a psychological exploration. The whole book becomes an experiment in surrealism.

    • Wenceslao_Moreno

      Yep. Unless, I don’t know, he’s projecting it all, but that’s not how it comes off.

  • Va Quero

    I really liked how the woman who washes and folds finds the wedding rings in the washer and that that pulls back to earlier in the book : “Your brain has wrapped a comfortable piece of fabric (ribbon?) around where memories are stored (the wedding rings?).”

  • Wenceslao_Moreno

    Grief, I figure. Grief, and loss and sadness, and the craziness that comes with grieving and losing and sadding so hard. All vividly told, if not with enough cohesion.

    • notwavingbutdrowning

      Yes. It created a world where madness of the grief has taken over — the grief that comes with the loss deep and profound love. Although the deep and profound love part is not quite as strongly felt.

    • Belltolls

      She was getting the right emotional reactions from me but so did BEE in American Psycho. I don’t like my novelists to be so obviously manipulative

  • Belltolls

    I had a girlfriend in LA who was a cutter. This novel would be like porn to her. Except for that she was great by the way. Don’t want you to get the wrong idea.

    • Wenceslao_Moreno

      I almost dated a cutter, and I went, “Oh, hell no!” and ran away. Really fast.

      • Wenceslao_Moreno

        Oh, ha, twice. There was another cutter. Yelled “Oh, hell no!” that time, too.

        • Wenceslao_Moreno

          Pretty sure all women in LA are cutters, anyhow. Swing a dead cat, hit a cutter.

          • Belltolls

            She really was fine except for that.

  • Wenceslao_Moreno

    A lot of nice things. The guy is vanishing from the world, can’t help it, yet planks up his windows and paints I’M STILL HERE on them. Desperate to connect, not connected.

    • notwavingbutdrowning

      I’M STILL HERE is the most heart wrenching message in a book filled with failed attempts to communicate.

  • Va Quero

    O! I really liked that some of the craziness was actually forgotten memory. Like the electrified doorknob. he had come up with that idea earlier as an alarm system, never put it to use and forgot about it but remembered the possibility and so was fearful of his own design.

  • Va Quero

    There’s something going on about a wet stone. The wife smells like one. And stones and wet stones get mentioned a lot.

  • Wenceslao_Moreno

    Though it was part of the jarring outside crazy, the laundry lady’s nephew working at the police station, he was a funny kid. I liked him bopping around because he cracked me up. Trying to find the sugar cereal. But I was still all, “You shouldn’t be here.”

    • Va Quero

      Yeah. Liked him, but he couldn’t work at the police station. That didn’t fit. Also, didn’t like that the laundry lady flitted about moving from sane to not. The logic of it, I couldn’t find.

      • notwavingbutdrowning

        I got tired of the laundry lady.

        • Wenceslao_Moreno

          There was precious little point to laundry lady, really.

          • Va Quero

            She has to find the wedding rings.

  • viruswithshoes

    You can change the sorting order of comments by clicking the little star-shaped tool thing to the far right of My Disqus.

    • Wenceslao_Moreno

      I just figured that out right just now, you comment meddling fuck.

      • http://wordsmoker.com/ VirusWithShoes

        LOL

  • Va Quero

    I knew there was a reason I thought she might have slit her throat, page 160. “‘She was found with multiple lacerations on her arms and legs. Massive laceration on the right side femoral artery which killed her.’ He tapped the top of his right thigh. ‘Something caused by a dull blade, sad to say. No drugs in her system. Some vegetable matter in her stomach, also objects like thin cloth or paper, about the size of a berry.’” Not her throat! But, okay. So maybe climbing out there in the back, maybe over a fence and sliced her leg open.

    I have a lot of typos tonight. Sorry.

    • notwavingbutdrowning

      THE BERRIES!

      • Wenceslao_Moreno

        There were harsh brambles and shit back there. But he also had a thing for weird dentist tools, so…

        • Wenceslao_Moreno

          And quite a bit of broken glass made appearances.

          • Wenceslao_Moreno

            Fights? Violent fights, with the breaking of things, and forgotten in the haze of crazy?

          • notwavingbutdrowning

            How come you have a picture icon now? How did you do that?

          • Wenceslao_Moreno

            I clicked on some fucking thing earlier and found the place to do it.

  • http://wordsmoker.com/ VirusWithShoes

    No. Click on “Discussion” at the top right of your comments list here, and choose “Oldest”. That’s how you do it.

    I’m learning too. btw.

    • Wenceslao_Moreno

      What if I want “Newest” on top, you Hitler?

      • Belltolls

        How do I make my comments, the “best.”

  • http://wordsmoker.com/ VirusWithShoes

    I forgot how gay these things were to people who didn’t read the book.

  • http://wordsmoker.com/ VirusWithShoes

    I wonder if I can embed a picture?

    • http://wordsmoker.com/ VirusWithShoes

      Awesome.

      • http://wordsmoker.com/ VirusWithShoes

        You can upload and embed images, everyone. From your computer.

        • http://wordsmoker.com/ VirusWithShoes

          This is from another site. Just paste the link into the box that pops up, instead of linking to a picture on your computer.

    • Wenceslao_Moreno

      I see no picture, you prick.

      • http://wordsmoker.com/ VirusWithShoes

        Fag.

  • Wenceslao_Moreno

    Amelia Grey reminds me of Jim Krusoe. She’s more vivid, and sly with humor, but he does a better job of hanging a world of crazy that holds together.

    • Belltolls

      She is fine. The kids will like her. Nice short paras. Just 140 clauses long. I need more story. But I am old.

      • Wenceslao_Moreno

        Was breezy, for sure.

  • http://wordsmoker.com/ VirusWithShoes

    Hahaha. I think our cheap-ass server crashed. Sorry.

  • notwavingbutdrowning

    Okay. Now I have to figure out how to make this my icon.

    • notwavingbutdrowning

      Did it!