Beautiful Days

May 15, 2024
The days depicted in Williams' first story collection are hardly beautiful. Instead, they tilt toward baffling or bizarre. Some protagonists helplessly drift through life. Others are paralyzed by fear or failure, tormented by loneliness and regret. In "The New Toe," a two-year-old grows an extra toe. Shockingly, his father amputates the superfluous digit with wire cutters then flushes it down the toilet. "Mousetraps" describes a man's bewildering experience at a small hardware store. In "Return to Crashaw," a 74-year-old tourguide driver must cope with some disruptive passengers on a visit to mysterious megaliths in the desert. Other tales feature a man who f inds his elderly neighbor dead in her armchair with the presence of a silent stranger in the room, an analytics firm receiving troubling emails, a secluded cottage where the flow of time is jumbled, and a mother who "buries her teeth when they fall out: six little funerals." Williams' characters are troubled, their predicaments provocative.

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May 15, 2024
A clutch of eerie domestic tales, infused with contemporary paranoia. Most of the stories in Williams' bracing debut are narrated by mild-mannered men witnessing the world shift and warp around them. In "Trial Run," a man finds a co-worker sunk in antisemitic conspiracy-mongering about the boss. In "A New Toe," a father finds that his infant son has sprung exactly that. An especially effective (and hallucinatory) story, "Lucca Castle," takes its narrator from gentle anxiety over the well-being of his daughter to odd coincidences involving his girlfriend, late wife, and an apocalyptic theorist. Much like George Saunders, Williams develops setups rooted in equal parts absurdity and peril: "Return to Crashaw" is narrated by a tour guide at a peculiar desert site filled with megaliths of unknown origin; "Wood Sorrel House" and "Ghost Image" both turn on fathers whose families fragment in post-apocalyptic scenarios. But unlike Saunders, Williams doesn't mine his setups for humor, cultivating a horror story vibe. In "Mousetraps," a man's hunt for a humane trap takes him into the depths of a hardware store, a mazelike symbol for humanity's own constrictions, and "Red Light" takes what should be an erotic kinky online hookup and makes it a minefield of uncertainty. Some stories, like "Ghost Image," push narrative cohesion to the breaking point, recalling Barthelme at his most out-there. But throughout, Williams is determined to metaphorically work through the fear and feelings of disassociation from modern life. We're much like the narrator of "Golf Cart," who in the middle of the night is summoned by his brother to confront some unnamed and unseen dangers: As the story intensifies, the narrator's brother muses, "There's no way life is real." Williams persuades you that the guy might have a point. Lyrical, well-crafted, offbeat yarns.

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Starred review from June 24, 2024
Williams’s remarkable debut collection explores grief and masculinity in stories that hint at their characters’ strange afterlives. The recently divorced narrator of “Trial Run” trudges into the office during a snowstorm, where he’s unhappily shut in with a conspiracy theorist security guard and a toxic coworker. The narrator has no love for either man, but by the story’s revelatory ending, he has turned his unforgiving gaze on himself. In “Red Light,” an oddball and increasingly tense tale, a man named Parker grows curious about the boyfriend of the woman he’s having sex with, who’s watching Parker and the woman while hiding in a closet. “Lucca Castle,” “Ghost Image,” and “Return to Crashaw” each follow a different man’s stumbling attempt to forge a new life after his wife’s death. Their respective settings—a yacht headquartering an anti-capitalist cult off the coast of Queens, N.Y., a bombed-out Disney World, and a sandstone monument that attracts UFO obsessives—are rendered in an unsettling and deeply captivating dream logic, hinting at the possibility that the narrators are already dead (the narrator of “Ghost Image,” who spots a “Hell Is Real” billboard while driving across the country, wonders if he’s “entered hell... the hell of earthbound ghosts that repeat the same actions, haunt the same spaces”). Williams’s tales deserve favorable comparison to the stories of Wells Tower and George Saunders.