by Joy Williams
First published 2025
Twin sisters discover they have inherited wealth from industrial contamination. The family fortune comes with a terrible price: they must carry out a brutal act to make amends for the environmental damage. In another tale, a man cannot break free from his boarding school memories, trapped in recollections of lost innocence. The collection concludes with the pelican child, who shares a chicken-legged dwelling with the harsh and skeletal Baba Yaga. Williams places her characters in a merciless world where climate catastrophe and human brutality offer slim chances for survival. They search for meaning while battling an uncaring cosmos. Each story follows people trying to find their way through a damaged and bewildering terrain, where the planet's grief sounds loudest during nighttime hours.
Genres: literary-fiction, collections, speculative-fiction, contemporary, dark-fantasy, short-story-collection
Vibes: atmospheric, dark, haunting, melancholic, thought-provoking, unsettling
Tropes: generational-burden, interconnected-stories, moral-reckoning, multiple-perspectives
Setting: Chicken-legged hut
176 pages · Paperback · Vintage
Content warnings: death, violence