Death and immortality: The former is definitely real, but what about the latter? That question has vexed authors since The Epic of Gilgamesh. Good topics never go out of fashion, however, as Pulitzer Prize finalist Joy Williams (Concerning the Future of Souls) demonstrates in The Pelican Child, a collection of a dozen excellent stories in which she puts her deceptively minimalist spin on the subject of finality. Consider "Stuff," in which a 63-year-old nature writer for a community newspaper learns he's dying of lung cancer--the poor guy smoked too many "work sticks"--and visits his 100-year-old mother in her care facility. Add to the mix the fact that she's a gnostic prone to philosophical musings, and the result is a beguiling dialogue spun from a simple premise.
Williams does the same in all of these stories. In "Chaunt," a woman in yet another nursing home comes to grips with the death of her young son. "Chicken Hill" is a story about a woman who, after attending a funeral for a little boy, befriends a little girl who quotes Thomas Aquinas and asks provocative questions such as, "What would you say your discomfort level is right now, on a scale of one to ten?" And then there's "Baba Iaga & The Pelican Child," in which the "bony, ill-tempered" supernatural witch from Slavic folklore smells "cruel death" when John James Audubon asks to draw her pelican-child daughter and "make her immortal." Alternately creepy and magical, these stories are further evidence of Williams's skill at concocting unsettling works that are more profound than they first appear. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer