At least once every year, a debut short-story collection comes along and gets under my skin. Last year, it was Every Drop Is a Man's Nightmare, by Megan Kamalei Kakimoto, and the year before that, it was Bliss Montage, by Ling Ma. All these months later, despite reading thousands of pages since, I can still remember plot details from individual stories in those books.
In 2024, that collection is Beautiful Days, by Zach Williams—a subtle and speculative barn-burner that fans of Stephen King and Ling Ma will devour. Like the short fiction of Brian Evenson, the stories in Beautiful Days are about the horrors of encountering something completely unknowable in the course of everyday life, whether it's the mind-warping experience of parenthood or the echo-chamber effect of the Internet and social media. It opens with "Trial Run," in which a Manhattan office drone is trapped in a skyscraper during a snowstorm that may or may not be real, with two coworkers who may or may not mean him harm.
In "Neighbors," which went viral in The New Yorker earlier this year, a San Francisco man tries to perform a wellness check on his next-door neighbor, only to stumble upon a scene he can't rationally explain. In "Wood Sorrel House," new parents find themselves in an Edenic setting to raise their child but can't remember how they got there. These stories wade into uncanny waters gradually, but others—like "Return to Crashaw," featuring tourists who visit mysterious megaliths in the desert—emb.
