Posted inEditor's Pick

House Heart

Amelia Gray | Longreads | April 13, 2015 | 3,719 words

“I love this story for its wryness and subtlety, but most especially for its willingness to take me where I don’t want to go.” A short story from Amelia Gray’s new collection, Gutshot.

Posted inBooks, Fiction, Story

House Heart

“I love this story for its wryness and subtlety, but most especially for its willingness to take me where I don’t want to go.”
Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Amelia Gray | GutshotTin House | December 2012 | 15 minutes (3,719 words)

We’re thrilled to share a short story by Amelia Gray, from her new collection, Gutshot. “House Heart” was published in the December 2012 issue of Tin House, and it was our Longreads Member Pick in 2013. Here’s more from Tin House assistant editor Emma Komlos-Hrobsky:

“In Amelia Gray’s ‘House Heart,’ a couple entraps a young woman in their ventilation system in a game equal parts erotic and perverse. ‘We all had our individual function,’ says Gray’s narrator, ‘and hers was to be the life of the house.’ Gray’s own writing does similar eerie work in animating uncomfortable, secret, interior spaces. Something strange and dark and distinctly human moves just beneath the cool deadpan of her authorial voice. I love this story for its wryness and subtlety, but most especially for its willingness to take me where I don’t want to go.”

Continue reading “House Heart”