RaveThe RumpusWith an impressive range of styles, voices, and preoccupations all vying for priority, Gutshot is a difficult collection to discuss as a whole; it would be a disservice to Gray’s carefully curated chaos to wrestle the collection into a mold or to generalize unifying themes ... While the creative leaps in Gray’s micro-fictions are impressive, Gutshot’s strongest stories are those where Gray’s attention lingers, where characters and communities are pushed to their limits in uncomfortable and uncanny situations ... Divided into four sections with a total of thirty seven stories, Gutshot is most interesting not as the sum of its parts, but rather as a frenetic experiment in imagination, in planting the seeds of a narrative only to crush whatever grows. Gray is especially daring as she takes on allegorical-seeming premises only to reject the notion of a moral ... Gutshot finds Gray at her most vicious and powerful. In these stories, Gray’s characters generate their own chaos; not only do their attempts at good manners fail, they typically crash and burn, devolving into scenes of cathartic violence or complete dissolution of social norms.
