Two demographics that aren't necessarily mutually exclusive--devotees of literary fiction, and casual readers who appreciate stories that make their skin crawl--should pick up Beautiful Days, Zach Williams's debut collection. Paranoia is a popular topic for fiction, and one that Williams explores in these 10 well-honed tales. Start with "Trial Run," a creepy work about a New York analytics firm that receives white supremacist threats, and an employee who seems unstable enough to be the culprit. Then there's "Golf Cart," in which the narrator's brother wants help investigating disturbances on a family property and grouses about the "surveillance capitalist industrialist complex." Even more unsettling is the central figure of "Lucca Castle," who posits that a nifty solution to capitalism and other worldwide problems is "mass destruction."
Capitalism takes a beating, but Williams doesn't spare families, either. "Wood Sorrel House" is the dystopian tale of a couple and their young son at a summer rental, where food mysteriously appears in the freezer, and their son is somehow unhurt when he falls. "Mousetraps" dramatizes a nightmarish trip to the hardware store. And parents may feel a bolt of terror from "The New Toe," about the appearance of a sixth toe on a two-year-old's left foot. These unnerving stories succeed thanks to tight plotting and Williams's gift for evocative descriptions, as when he describes the moon in "Golf Cart" as "the color of an old flashlight under a sheet." Check out Beautiful Days, but maybe not in times of distress. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer