A Goodreads-Collage Review of Museum Of The Weird
By Amelia Gray | Review by
J.A. Tyler
If you open goodreads.com you open what is essentially on online reader’s diary, a place where you can see 1 – 5 star ratings (1 = “Didn’t like it”, 5 = “It was Amazing”) plus you can add comments or link to reviews published elsewhere. And sometimes, when I finish a book, when I am still digesting, I check out Goodreads to see what other folks thought. And honestly, what the readers thought of Amelia Gray’s FC2 Ronald Sukenick / American Book Review Innovative Fiction Prize winning title Museum Of The Weird was exactly what I was going to write. So instead of writing my straightforward review, I’m going to collage together their Goodreads comments into a review:
To begin with, Richard T. gave this book 5 stars and said that “Amelia Gray never disappoints” and that this book is “a wild collection of surreal tales, that will haunt you, while at the same time, bring you in close and give you a hug, all the while whistling a tune that is kind of creepy and yet kind of innocent. Expect the unexpected.” Yes. Museum Of The Weird is full of unexpected moments (a plate of hair arrives for dinner, a man marries a paring knife, et cetera) and does, as Richard T. points out, haunt as well as hug. Well said Richard T. I was certainly not disappointed either.
from Dinner
When the waiter brought a plate of hair to the table alongside Beth’s soup, it was difficult to be polite about it. Still, Beth felt the need to be polite, because it was a nice restaurant, and she was on a date for the first time in months, and with a guy she actually liked. His name was Dave and he smelled like shaving cream and the subway.
Ben T. gave it 4 stars (“Really Liked It”) and said that this book is “a collection full of weirdness and richness and flights of imagination, that still kept returning to a theme as classic as any: how do we connect, or more accurately, how do damaged people make connections with one another, and ultimately themselves, how does this work, can it work and what are we to do if it doesn’t?” Wow. That is right on. No matter how far Gray gets from normalcy (how about an armadillo and a penguin having a barroom conversation?) the thematic link is always, as Ben T. says, about the human connections that none of us can completely avoid or assuage:
from The Darkness
“I think I’d call us strange bedfellows,” the armadillo said.
The penguin barely heard her. He was, at that moment, attempting to hold a straw between his flippers.
The armadillo centered her shell on the barstool. She was drinking a Miller High Life.
“Strange bedfellows indeed,” she said.
And while Gray is pleasing in these ways, there are some critiques to be made:
Gene (who gave this book another 5 star rating) said, and I agree, that “...there were two shorter pieces where I thought, that’s clever but the conceits felt more weighty than the actual stories. However, that’s two out of twenty-four, that's way better odds than most story collections with their filler patties...Amelia has this deft, careful hand where the craft is evident but the stories feel organic and true and even though she’s not doing the weird syntactic sentential stuff, her sentences still have a way of surprising...” Yes Gene, nice work. You seem like a smart reader. I’ll friend you when I’m done typing this.
And Rupert W. (who gave this title a 4 star rating) said “Despite the cover, which I like, this collection seemed to hold more powerful darkness than AM/PM, which felt more lyrical and whimsical (though there was still a lot of great lighter shades of darkness)...” I too found the cover to bend a bit more towards whimsy than the stories themselves, which did seem as Rupert W. points out, a shade darker than the AM/PM collection.
And in spite of those small critiques, and even though he is the cover artist of Museum Of The Weird, I have to agree with Zach P.’s (who gave the book 5 stars) succinct assessment: “I just got tickled by something that don’t even have fingers.”
from Love, Mortar
My love for you is like a brick. It sits silent in me when you bring out my food at the Dine and Dart, red tray aloft, your skin gleaming like grilled onions. My love is rough around the edges but solid through the center, fresh from the kiln. My love for you is heavy and dark, Jenny, it builds and breaks down, Jenny, it cracks the windows between you and me—you, mixing milkshakes for the little league winners, and me, miserly with sandwich wrappers in my car. You, smiling down at the register like a woman with secrets and me, in agony over the golden arch of your eyebrow.
So thank you Goodreads readers. You have said all the nice and critical things that I would have said about Amelia Gray’s Museum Of The Weird. The lessons to be learned: Amelia Gray has tricks up her sleeves that you want to witness. Reviewing just means reading and honestly responding to a book. Goodreads is a killer site. and Rumble has, perhaps, just posted the first ever Goodreads-Collage Review, take it in.
J.A. Tyler reviews books and things for Rumble Magazine. He is also founding editor of mud luscious / ml press. He is an iPad 4.