"Threats"

Amelia Gray grew up in Tucson, Arizona. Her first collection of stories, AM/PM, was published in 2009. Her second collection, Museum of the Weird, was awarded the Ronald Sukenick/American Book Review Innovative Fiction Prize. She lives in Los Angeles.

Gray applied the Page 69 Test to Threats, her first novel, and reported the following:

This page happens to introduce a new setting, one of only a few in the book. It's a laundromat, where our strange main character, David, meets another strange person, a woman who is washing the same clothes over and over again:

The laundromat was the same as it has always been. The brand of detergent stocked in the automatic dispenser had changed, but the dispenser itself remained original to the space. The old pinball machine remained, wherein the silver balls had been tasked with escaping a haunted house.

I was thinking of an old laundromat in San Marcos, TX, which had (I think) a Galaga machine. The pinball machine is in another San Marcos locale, the Showdown, which was always so thick with smoke that you'd re-up any hangover you'd had in the past four days. Anyway, that pinball machine is a pretty good metaphor for the book.

Learn more about the book and author at Amelia Gray's website.

--Marshal Zeringue