To say Amelia Gray belongs in the hilariously inventive hallows of Ann Quin and Rikki Ducornet would be to miss her light. This book is gleaming evidence of the author as a trophy case unto herself, wrought of magic equally surprising, wicked, giddy, and loaded with a megaton of Boom.
Museum of the Weird
Amelia Gray
Winner of FC2’s American Book Review/Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize
A monogrammed cube appears in your town. Your landlord cheats you out of first place in the annual Christmas decorating contest. You need to learn how to love and care for your mate — a paring knife. These situations and more reveal the wondrous play and surreal humor that make up the stories in Amelia Gray’s stunning collection of stories: Museum of the Weird.
Acerbic wit and luminous prose mark these shorts, while sickness and death lurk amidst the humor. Characters find their footing in these bizarre scenarios and manage to fall into redemption and rebirth. Museum of the Weird invites you into its hallways, then beguiles, bewitches, and reveals a writer who has discovered a manner of storytelling all her own.
Amelia Gray’s Museum of the Weird is a cabinet of curiosities — a talking armadillo, a serial killer named God, a woman who amputates her toes for dinner, a man married to a paring knife — this collection of stories is so good and funny and wondrous that I couldn’t look away from her dark and curious imagination.