On "Labyrinth" by Amelia Gray (2026 words) ****

It's been a while since I featured an Amelia Gray story. Sometimes I check out her tweets, which are almost always amusing (one critic even claims they're better than her stories). And she's come quite a ways since I first came across her work online: two short story collections, then a novel from a major publisher, then another novel. And now this: a story in the New Yorker, the cream of the cream. Congratulations! This one features Gray's typical fascination with the absurd, though it's set in a mundane location, one that when we think about it, really is rather absurd: a corn maze. Only this one isn't just a maze--it's a labyrinth, full of the threat of evil just around the bend (again, another typical element in Gray's stories, as if extraordinary trouble lies within the ordinary). Are you hero enough to follow it through? Jim is. Try it here at the New Yorker.

On "Dinner" by Amelia Gray (576 words) ****

In Amelia Gray's bizarre world, someone isn't served just soup with a hair in it but in fact a full plate of hair. This sets up the embarrassing situation of not knowing what to do with it. Is this some kind of delicacy? How does one eat it? What's more, the issue is that this is a date. I love how this story gets at all the awkwardness that goes along with first dates, first days on the job, and other firsts, where we're striving to make the right impression and find ourselves warring within over what we want and what we want, who we are and who we want to show that we are. Read the story here at Shelf Life Magazine.

On "Amelia Gray's Museum of the Weird" by Amelia Gray ***

I've greatly enjoyed Gray's stories on the Web, as evidenced by the number that I've featured here on the blog. They have a kind of zaniness that makes them incredibly fun to read. At their best, they also manage to comment in a disturbing way on our contemporary world. Stories like "Babies," wherein a woman wakes to find she's birthed a new baby each day, are funny and yet horrifying, a combination that first made me a big fan of Jeffrey Eugenides Virgin Suicides back in the day. So it was with great earnestness that I finally turned to a full collection of hers.

The collection of mostly very short stories reads very quickly. Many of these pieces have been featured online. And many of these pieces read like the tales one would find online. What I mean is that many aren't really tales. They're interesting forays into the absurd, playful things you'd find on sites like McSweeney's Internet Tendencies. And while such makes for fun reading, the collection as a whole for me became weighted a bit too much toward the weird. After a while, I wanted more things to add up.

The best stories in the collection seem to be those freighted toward the start of the collection. Or perhaps, the best stories are those I read when I hadn't become inured to the weirdness. "Babies" is a great lead-in. Another good one, "Unsolved Mystery," surprisingly wasn't published independently before the collection's publication. It involves a detective on the hunt for a serial killer, and the detective's relationship problems and his faith in God. Gray nails the closing on this one and manages to make all these spinning plates relate to one another and work off of one another to say something about spirituality and knowledge.

In the "entertaining but not really a story" category would be such pieces as "Trip Advisory" offering advice on visiting Reagon's boyhood home, and "Code of Operation," a set of rules for a Snake Farm run by an obviously deranged owner.

On "How He Felt" by Amelia Gray (280 words) ***

In this very short piece, a man struggles with how to get across his feelings to the world. Gray's story hints at the quintessential problem of artists--be it painters, musicians, or writers--everywhere. Only a few artists ever see their work take on the sort of emotional power in others they would hope for, and yet beyond that, because each person experiences things uniquely, it's not necessarily the same feeling. But we can delude ourselves into thinking it is--and maybe that's enough. Read the story here at Wigleaf.

On "Babies" by Amelia Gray (438 words) ****

A relatively new friend of mine is pregnant--again--by the same man who gave her the last child seven years ago, the same man she refuses to marry because of some pretty serious problems in their relationship. For one thing, he isn't "amenable" to babies--not at first. Enter Amelia Gray, whose story parallels my friend's but speeds it up by about a nine months. And then . . . Let's just say this is a story that really doesn't get started until its ending. This story plays well with one's head. Read the story here at Guernica.

On "There Will Be Sense" by Amelia Gray (3406 words) ****

What is your responsibility? If this were a movie, that's the line that might end up getting repeated over and over again the way Cool Hand Luke's "What we have here is a failure to communicate" does. Sure, What is your responsibility? doesn't have quite the same ring, but it becomes a kind of mantra in this story that takes on extra shades of meaning as the story progresses. Or try this: create a list of food you eat every day. Does it prove that your life is, like, boring? (If not, congratulations Mr./Ms. Cook.) This story is full of great techniques that convey things better than words by themselves could. Read it here at Diagram.