Publishers Weekly
★ 06/24/2024
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. (June)
From the Publisher
One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2024
One of The New Yorker's Best Books We've Read in 2024 So Far
One of Lit Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2024 • One of Publisher's Weekly's 10 Promising Fiction Debuts of Spring 2024
"A bright new voice in fiction…A genuine young talent, one who deftly palpates the dark areas of human psyches…Like Gabriel García Márquez and Stephen King, Williams understands how unnervingly intense and unknowable children can be. Like J.G. Ballard, he savors postapocalyptic vistas. But Williams is his own writer…He pushes you slowly off into the night, then down long embankments…we might be staring before long at [the] 'Selected Stories of Zach Williams.'" —Dwight Garner, The New York Times Book Review
“Beautiful Days is one of the year’s best debuts. . .a glorious creepfest reminiscent of speculative collections by Carmen Maria Machado, Mariana Enríquez and other children of Lovecraft....Williams sees beyond newspaper headlines to a world cleaved apart by forces we’ve unleashed, blinkered by arrogance and greed. . .Beautiful Days is the spear tip of his potential. This writer’s got talent to burn.” —Hamilton Cain, The Washington Post
"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… 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.” —The Boston Globe
“At least once every year, a debut short-story collection comes along and gets under my skin. . . In 2024, that collection is Beautiful Days. . .a subtle and speculative barn-burner that fans of Stephen King and Ling Ma will devour.” —Esquire
“Remarkable. . . Revelatory. . . Williams's tales deserve favorable comparison to the stories of Wells Tower and George Saunders.” —Publishers Weekly *starred review*
“Beautiful Days. . .makes the case for a new adage: strange fiction can help us tell the truth....a writer who will be around for a long time.” —Chicago Review of Books
“There’s a quiet intensity to the way Zach Williams crafts short fiction, like a coiled spring ready to snap, or a snake about to strike. . .His prose is precise, witty and full of vivid imagery, with a gift for marrying tension and humanity that calls to mind John Cheever or Shirley Jackson. That makes Beautiful Days a powerful, unsettling, genuinely thrilling collection, one that singles Williams out as a must-read voice in fiction.” —BookPage *starred review*
“A brilliant debut.” —Jeffrey Eugenides, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of The Marriage Plot
“Zach Williams is a brilliant, singular, deep, and deeply entertaining writer. You will continue to think about and feel these stories long after you have finished reading them. They will change you.” —Jonathan Safran Foer, New York Times bestseller and author of Here I Am
“Beautiful Days is a remarkable collection. These stories are full of irony and absurdity, but are never sleight, glib or waggish. Zach Williams paints us into every story with quick, deft strokes and then unfolds, with a scarily confident hand, the rest of the canvas, full of surprises and truths and stuff we never imagined.” —Percival Everett, Booker Prize finalist and author of James
“Beautiful Days brings a reader though strange and grounded lands on just the other side of reality. You will come through changed, shaken, thoughtful, and totally amazed.” —Samantha Hunt, author of The Unwritten Book
“[Zach Williams's] beautiful, disquieting stories are profound in the true meaning of that word—they go deep. He's a major talent...an exciting debut.” —Hari Kunzru, author of White Tears, Red Pill and Blue Ruin
“Beautiful Days contains elegant mysteries, and the book stays in the mind long after you've read it.” —Charles Baxter, author of The Sun Collective
“The visionary weirdness of these stories feels hauntingly attuned to our time.” —Elizabeth Tallent, author of Scratched: A Memoir of Perfectionism
“Wide-eyed on the world and its often mystical ways, there’s a sparkle of magic and mystery in every elegant sentence of these wondrously curious, unsettling, and absolutely original stories. I devoured them with pure delight—and with awe for this writer’s singular imagination and talent." —Chang-rae Lee, author of My Year Abroad
“[A] bracing debut. . . Much like George Saunders, Williams develops setups rooted in equal parts absurdity and peril. . . determined to metaphorically work through the fear and feelings of disassociation from modern life. . . Lyrical, well-crafted, offbeat yarns.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Provocative.” —Booklist
Kirkus Reviews
2024-04-19
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.
