Beautiful Days

Uncanny, subtle and spectacular. Once every year, a debut collection comes along and gets under my skin... In 2024, that collection is Beautiful Days. Fans of Stephen King and Ling Ma will devour [these stories] 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 * Esquire *
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 is such a debut . . . Influences from Shirley Jackson to Donald Barthelme, video games to George Saunders, are readily apparent, and yet Williams’s fiction always feels bracingly distinctive . . . Profound and moving, a set of stories that burn with curiosity and blaze with feeling * Boston Globe *
Impressive, evocative psychological horror… Small surrealisms fleck the storytelling [and] the details are spot on… [Zach Williams is] a genuine young talent, one who deftly palpates the dark areas of human psyches… [He] pushes you slowly off into the night * The New York Times *
A pensive, artfully of-the-moment short story collection in which danger and farce tussle for dominance. . . Expect offbeat lyricism, dreamlike paranoia and more than a hint of horror * Guardian *
It is often said that truth is stranger than fiction. But Beautiful Days makes the case for a new adage: strange fiction can help us tell the truth. . . The entire collection is varied, yet focused; serious, yet throw-your-head-back funny; virtuosic in the way of a writer who will be around for a long time. . . It calls to mind Donald Barthelme, George Saunders, and Jennifer Egan. Like these writers, Williams uses his strange and scary premises to reveal the persistent humanity of his characters * Chicago Review of Books *
Zach Williams is a brilliant, singular, 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, author of 'Everything is Illuminated'
Unsettling and deeply captivating... A remarkable debut collection [which] explores grief and masculinity in stories that hint at their characters’ strange afterlives...Beautiful Days deserves favorable comparison to the stories of Wells Tower and George Saunders * Publishers Weekly, Starred Review *
A remarkable collection, full of irony and absurdity, but 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, author of 'The Trees'
Williams’s short-story collection is one of the year’s superlative debuts, a glorious creepfest teeming with friends and foes, natural and supernatural * The Washington Post, '50 notable works of fiction from 2024' *
A powerful, unsettling, genuinely thrilling collection that singles Zach Williams out as a must-read voice in fiction... Like a coiled spring ready to snap, or a snake about to strike, you can sense tension lurking in the careful prose and dreamy strangeness of his worlds... Precise, witty and full of vivid imagery, with a gift for marrying tension and humanity that calls to mind John Cheever or Shirley Jackson * Bookpage *