‘Beautiful Days’, stories, by Zach Williams    (2024) – 219 pages

Zach Williams is being promoted as “the Next Big Thing” in fiction. ‘Beautiful Days’ by Zach Williams is an ambitious writer’s first collection of fiction. Williams has already had two stories, “Neighbors” and “Wood Sorrel House”, published in the New Yorker to much acclaim. His story “Trial Run” won the Paris Review Award for Fiction. These three stories are included in the ‘Beautiful Days’ collection along with seven other stories.

It is indeed refreshing but sometimes unnerving to have a writer who will push against the limits of what a story can do. These stories go at least one or two steps beyond this reader’s expectations. That is a good thing, usually.

In “Neighbors”, Tom and his wife Anna, who was having an affair that she wanted to escape from, move to a house in San Francisco four blocks from the Pacific ocean. An old woman named Bing lives next door. One day Tom does not hear anything coming from that woman’s house. Her son calls him and asks him to check up on her. Her son had previously given him the key to the house. Tom enters the house and finds her dead body but also a man sitting across from her. The man says nothing but moves across the room.

Like “Neighbors”, several of these stories have an eerie setting. They purposely make the reader uncomfortable, but then pull back from the precipice. We are sort of in Steven King territory here, but here the stories are not so obviously horror stories. Williams’ stories have a deeper subtext. These stories affect the reader at the visceral level rather than at the intellectual level.

In “Trial Run”, an unknown entity called TruthFlex is sending out disturbing messages about their manager, Lisa.

“Lisa Horowitz is a CULTURAL MARXIST – !WHITE GENOCIDE!”

On one snowy winter day, our unnamed narrator decides to go to work anyhow. Besides the security guard Manny, the only other person in the building is Shel. Our narrator is hesitant to talk to Shel but finally he must. After his disturbing conversation with Shel, he considers the following which captures the rightfully ominous paranoid spirit of our times:

“I’d have to report Shel. There was no question about that. He was unstable, possibly delusional, an abuser evidently, and he lacked the basic judgment not to reveal those things to a colleague. Anyway he might well be TruthFlex. Who else, if not him? Shel needed help, that was clear, and I hope he’d get it. But what if there were guns in that gym bag?. I’d tell Lisa.”

All of these stories go beyond what we normally expect from a story which can make the story difficult to follow for an unsuspecting reader. I did not get fully into the spirit of these stories until my fifth one, until I read “Golf Cart” which is my favorite.

Zach Williams is attempting more than most writers attempt. We wish him luck.

Grade:     A-