Nothing thrills a book reviewer more than a debut book so electrifying, so original, such an auspicious announcement of a major talent, that it makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck. I am delighted to say that Zach Williams’s story collection, “Beautiful Days,” is such a debut. It accompanied me during a recent bout of COVID, and I found myself wondering: Was it due to the fever or the intoxication of reading 10 stories so deliciously odd and endearingly compelling that I felt my pulse race, my heart flutter, and my spirit lift off over and over again? Williams began the stories collected here in 2016, and the surreal horrors and pervasive anxieties of the last eight years animate it both explicitly and implicitly. Contemporary preoccupations from political polarization, the encroachments of artificial intelligence, the degradation of the environment due to pollution, climate change, and rapacious development: They’re all here. The evils of Big Tech and capitalism, or what a cult leader in one story calls “the twin forces of capital and technology, which have now developed beyond our ability to control them” are responsible for “wealth inequality, ecological collapse, infrastructural decay, political instability.” Some characters consider “hedge funders, private equity, big tech” the enemies, while others go after DEI activists, Jews, or feminists. The worlds of these stories are scored with grievance and grief, resentment and regret, apathy and anomie.
The stories’ subjects seem to have bubbled up from a fertile, teeming, uninhibited subconscious, and yet the prose is precise, musical, and exquisitely calibrated for maximum effect. Each story depicts a strange, off-kilter world reflective of, adjacent to, or a future version of our own. Some stories have the explained supernaturalism of a “Scooby Doo” episode or Anne Radcliffe novel, while others gesture toward uncanny hauntings that exceed realistic explanation, and still others, most notably “Ghost Image,” veer into full-on sci-fi territory. Influences from Shirley Jackson to Donald Barthelme, video games to George Saunders, are readily apparent, and yet Williams’s fiction always feels bracingly distinctive.
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The collection opens with the tour de force “Trial Run,” originally published in the Paris Review. A snowstorm is blanketing New York City and a recently divorced man seeks refuge in his office building, only to find himself trapped there with Manny, a blustering and bombastic security guard, and Shel, a co-worker with “a hidden reserve of strangeness,” both of whom pepper him with questions and attempt to bond with him. To his dismay, he realizes that he’s stuck with two lunatics who think he’s one of them, “members of a strange league, known to each other by instinct, traded glances.” “This had always been Manny,” he comes to see, “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.”
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Characters spout canned lines and cliched gobbledygook from the Dark Web and appear improbably out of darkness. Secret militias, vast, shadowy networks and masked figures, cults, and “occultists” are everywhere. We have anarchists and conspiracy theorists, drones and secret police, cabals and coteries, exhibitionists and voyeurs. In “Red Light,” a man has sex with a woman he’s connected with on a hookup site, attempting to satisfy “her most decadent wants” while simultaneously “put[ting] on a show” for her boyfriend, who watches from inside a closet. In “Golf Cart,” two brothers careen around their family farm, “mere minutes from the dazzling hell of big-box highway commerce” while listening to the Grateful Dead’s “Dark Star” and “Morning Dew” and debating whether one brother’s job at Spotify means he’s become “part of the surveillance capitalist industrial complex … and … helping to urge on, more or less, the apocalypse.” “Neighbors,” which went viral after appearing in The New Yorker earlier this year, recounts a man stumbling onto an ominous scene of an elderly neighbor dead with a mysterious intruder near the body.
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The intense desire to keep a child “safe from scary things” motivates a number of Williams’s stories. In “Wood Sorel House,” which gives the collection its title, a young family experiences “beautiful days” in a setting of pastoral loveliness, but it becomes clear that they have been brought there unwillingly and without understanding the rules or even having a “rough cosmogony of the place.” In this bucolic gothic, the parents age and can be injured, but their son is unchanging and invulnerable. “The New Toe” is narrated by a father whose little boy suddenly sprouts an extra digit. In “Lucca Castle,” a recently widowed man who works in private equity and has an adolescent daughter stumbles, febrile, out of New York City and into a “cartoon hell.” The story recalls Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut,” Polanski’s “Rosemary’s Baby,” and Murakami’s “Kafka on the Shore” in its disquieting collapse of the border between normal life and a terrifying realm of disorienting darkness, its mordant humor, its revelation of malevolent secrets.
Many of Williams’s characters are wanderers. Some are adrift, lost, burned-out by grief, scalded by disappointment. Others are actively, even manically, in pursuit of a larger life, a broader vista, chasing ecstasy or answers. There is “something romantic in” many of these ostensibly jaded or exhausted characters.
Any reader seeking clear resolution at a story’s end will feel baffled or frustrated by the open-endedness of Williams’s imagination. But those who can embrace mystery, reside with uncertainty, stay attentive and alive in a spectral space will feel themselves transported by a set of stories that burn with curiosity and blaze with feeling. Throughout the collection, there is a profound and moving sense of the difficulty of making one’s way in an overwhelming and disorienting universe, an emphasis on “all the work incumbent … upon anyone, of assembling a universe in which to live, from scratch and anew, when that work is so hard.”
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BEAUTIFUL DAYS: Stories
By Zach Williams
Doubleday, 240 pages, $28
Priscilla Gilman is a former professor of English literature at Yale University and Vassar College and the author of “The Anti-Romantic Child: A Memoir of Unexpected Joy” and “The Critic’s Daughter.”