Williams kicks off with the macabre “Trial Run,” originally published in the Paris Review and chronicling a snow day in an understaffed Manhattan office, the narrator beset by a pair of sinister colleagues, a whiff of conspiracy: “This had always been Manny, the real Manny, just like that, back there, was the real Shel, hiding below the surface of routine, awaiting, with all the patience of a fanatic, some dark eventuality in which to reveal himself. They were members of a strange league, known to each other by instinct, traded glances.” A sense of menace and a chilly aura pervade the collection, underscoring Williams’s pointillist sentences and manipulation of mood.
In the longish “Wood Sorrel House,” a married couple and their toddler rent a summer place in the woods only to find out there’s no escape, no trace of humanity; they linger year after year, miraculously stocked with supplies, spiraling into madness while their son remains the same age. Here Williams flirts with surrealism, as he does in another story, “Mousetraps,” in which one Jeremy Booth flees the snares of his life by simply vanishing through a door.
Williams’s characters grapple with grief and foreboding. In the novella “Lucca Castle,” Walter, a Wall Street equity manager and newly widowed father of an adolescent daughter, falls prey to a mysterious flu and uses it as a rationale for playing hooky. He’s wary of finance titans: “People in our world fawned over Denton Whitwell, ironically ascribed witchy powers to him,” he observes. “Denton was a money genius, there was no denying that, but I’d never liked him: his carved-pumpkin smirk, his enormous body, the imperious decadence it suggested.” Hoarse-voiced, clad in sweatpants and flip-flops, guided by a waitress and her dog, Walter wanders among Long Island’s beaches and shallow bays, an echo of Tom Cruise adrift in Stanley Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut.” What he discovers during his odyssey shocks him.
The author’s technique is subtle but strikes with a bullwhip’s torque. “Golf Cart,” written in a realist vein, recounts the midnight misadventures of two 20-something brothers who live in cottages amid their father’s sprawling Delaware estate. They jounce around in a golf cart, checking imagined threats to their property; only at the conclusion of their ride does the younger sibling grasp the depth of his brother’s paranoia. Other stories thrum with menace: a masked figure looming over the corpse of a Chinese immigrant; a hardware shop lifted from a David Lynch film; a voyeuristic dwarf who cowers in his partner’s closet, watching her sexcapades.
Although Williams gravitates toward first-person narration, he’s equally adept at third- and second-person, as in “Return to Crashaw,” an homage to George Saunders. (There’s an Easter-egg allusion to Saunders’s acclaimed “Tenth of December.”) Williams sets “Ghost Image” in a dystopian near-future dictated by drones and military squads, computers generating multiple iterations of ourselves. In a singsong that recalls the tune “Bill Bailey,” his protagonist addresses a “Joe Daly,” his former IT boss in Ohio, who’s also somehow his estranged son and a drunk in a rural Southern bar. Even Disney World transforms into a zombie version of itself: “The ticket booths were abandoned, gates locked, but a nearby fence had a big hole in it. I came up on the park through a ring of shrubs and garbage. … Everything was in shadow. There were people here and there but they looked either confused or menacing, traveling in packs. The buildings and rides were cracked and weathered. A spray-painted swastika crossed the shuttered doors of a souvenir shop.”
Williams has an ear for the meandering rhythm; like Walter, he’s content to go with the flow: “I made my way down wide arteries and narrow side streets, through empty lots, in and out of sunlight, wired and jittery, feeling exposed to unfamiliar elements.” (Shorter pieces, “Red Light” and “The New Toe,” are a notch above MFA exercises.) The effect is buoyant if the vision’s grim. Williams expands the book’s contours much as helium fills a hot-air balloon, wafting us to the heights of his imagination.
And in “Beautiful Days,” the imagination is as close to transcendence as it gets. Actual dangers weigh us down: predatory capitalism, ecological degradation, AI. The title, then, is ironic: How many beautiful days still await as we spin violently toward cataclysms of our own making? He sees beyond newspaper headlines to a world cleaved apart by forces we’ve unleashed, blinkered by arrogance and greed. Will humanity survive, carrying the fire of civilization prophesied by Cormac McCarthy at the end of “The Road”? No doubt Williams will probe these themes in future work. “Beautiful Days” is the spear tip of his potential. This writer’s got talent to burn.
Hamilton Cain is a book critic and the author of “This Boy’s Faith: Notes from a Southern Baptist Upbringing.” He lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.
