HONORED GUEST

"To live was like being an honored guest," muses a teenage girl whose mother is dying. While death, loss and the likelihood of losing touch with reality are the focus of these 12 short stories by Williams, the elusive possibility of hope and mental well-being waits in the shadows, maybe even just within reach. Williams's deliciously fallible characters are often unfazed by their erratic behavior and violent eruptions. At work one day, a widowed masseuse in "Hammer" snaps her prosperous client's wrist bone without provocation. In "Charity," Richard refuses to stop for a needy family despite Janice's pleas. When he gets out of the car for gas, "Janice moved across the seat quickly, grasped the wheel and drove off," returning to the family and perhaps losing Richard forever. Williams's grasp of the slippery line between life and death is strong: she jars the reader with news of a debilitating accident or a fatality without a breath of forewarning. Her characters speak like poets or philosophers ("Words at night were feral things"), and her prose is imaginative and dynamic (a woman obsessed with visiting a mental institution prowls the halls, pretending "she was a virus, wandering without aim through someone's body"). Though some of her more absurd tales may perplex, discriminating readers will be greatly satisfied with this rich, darkly humorous and provocative collection. (Oct. 8)

Forecast: Often compared to Flannery O'Connor, Williams is a master of the short story. This is her first collection in more than a decade, and it follows on the heels of her Pulitzer-nominated novel The Quick and the Dead; it should be widely and enthusiastically reviewed. Seven-city author tour.