Our Reigning Prophet of Doom

Gideon Leek reviews Joy Williams’s latest story collection, “The Pelican Child.”

By Gideon LeekNovember 21, 2025

• Fiction

• Environment

“THE BELIEF IN a boundaryless human future is dead. We have exceeded the limits of acceptable destruction and diminishment. The misfortunes we’ve brought upon ourselves will soon reduce this world to ashes, out of which a new way will arise.”

Joy Williams is back—and bleaker than ever—with her new short story collection, The Pelican Child. (The above passage is from her story “My First Car.”) Williams is a strange sort of éminence grise of American letters: celebrated but elusive, in no small part because of her multitonal style—half sardonic, half sacred. Beginning as a quasi-gothic writer in the 1970s before absorbing the dry minimalism of the ’80s, Williams never fully decided on one style over the other. It is characteristic of her writing to abruptly switch between the two registers, as though Bret Easton Ellis was fighting for influence with Carson McCullers.

The effect—which is rarely imitated—can cause motion sickness, confusion, or a kind of readerly rapture. As Williams said of the final sentence of her story “Taking Care” (“Together they enter the shining rooms”), “it carries the story into the celestial, where it longs to go.” For Williams, the ending of a story or a novel is not just rooted in its beginnings, in its characters, in narrative logic, but also in the sway of “signs and dreams,” something above and beyond the story—God, or nature, or both. In the closing pages of her novel The Quick and the Dead (2000), the hero, Alice, reflects obliquely on the abrupt, anticlimactic, and, yes, celestial ending that she is in the middle of: “She preferred not finishing something to having it end on its own terms.” The stories in The Pelican Child are no different. Williams even has a character praising her style: “[S]he preferred the language of displacement and estrangement that prepared a path to revelation over language that simply refreshed and enlarged upon what she already knew.”

Then there is her sardonic side. In the story “Stuff” (from the new collection), an aging newspaper columnist is diagnosed with terminal cancer by a specialist: “Henry’s first thought was that his own doctor had been too embarrassed to tell him. His second thought was that this was unlikely.” His third thought is to tell his mother in her nursing home. Unfortunately, she’s become a Gnostic—a disciple of early Christian esoteric thought—whose changing ideas about life (she now, for example, “maintain[s] that the world is an illusion”) have left her rather pitiless. Instead of consoling her son, she chooses to wax poetic on his weakness: “When you were a boy, the other children would draw a circle around you in the playground and tell you you couldn’t break through it—and you couldn’t.” Henry, unable to deny the claim, minimizes: “Perhaps that happened once, Mother.” There is a macabre cruelty, a taste of bitterness, to these jokes.

More dark humor comes in “The Beach House.” An elderly father has decided to disinherit his daughter and give everything to a sanctuary for German shepherds. “It’s important to help the next generation along,” he says. “I’m your next generation, Dad,” she replies, only to have him respond: “Sometimes it’s for the best to skip one now and then.” Other arguments are equally fruitless:

“We’ve never even known a German shepherd,” Amber said.

“I had one as a young man. […] Titus.” […]

“Do you have a photograph?”

“No. He didn’t photograph well.”

Both of these are triple jokes with claim, counterclaim, and explanation ratcheting up the absurdity. The final hand-wave responses are glorious.

The celestial endings in this new collection are largely focused on the ecstatic moment of death—a topic Williams, now 81, seems to be pondering. Here, without spoiling anything, are some final moments: “There is a god-awful crash, and silence, as though nothing has happened”; “The corners of her poor veranda were dissolving into shadow. She didn’t see the child leave her. She didn’t even see herself leaving, having just, at last, gone.” Death as silence, as fade to black. And here, spoiling the end of “The Beach House,” is the dog-loving father’s death scene:

He closed his eyes […] his thoughts moving in an orderly fashion, like children in a snaking line, holding hands and following their teacher out of a building where some dangerous event was commencing. Like little children, his thoughts, innocent, trusting, and afraid. But who was this teacher? She was new to him. He was a transfer. This was his first day.

In his final moments, neither his daughter nor the German shepherds come to mind. Instead, it’s a fantasy of youth, rebirth, resurrection—a new teacher, his first day. That’s Williams’s vision of heaven: freedom from danger, and a renewal of the innocence needed to trust and, equally, to fear.

If Williams’s style hasn’t changed too much, then the world around her certainly has. In this collection, we find her dealing with the vagaries of modern life. Discomfort levels are requested. Radical silence groups are held. One character remarks that “a vaccination’s nothing more than a tracking device.” Another wonders about the danger of drinking from a scratched plastic glass. And, in a humorous moment, an older man is told it’s no longer “acceptable usage” to refer to a garment as “fire retardant.” “It resists ignition,” he explains. “It also has pockets.”

But these cultural changes are minute compared to the increasingly apocalyptic dimensions of Williams’s key social issue—environmental destruction, a focus of her writing since The Quick and the Dead. In virtually all these stories, Williams reaffirms her frustration at the senseless destruction of the planet. “Air-conditioning is a crime,” says one character. Another, disgusted, observes tourists laughing in a room lined with animal heads. Witnessing a truck spewing a black stream of exhaust, that same character mocks its driver by referring to the tackiness of “this effect, which honors freedom and individuality.” In “Stuff,” the environmental history of the nursing home is provided: it was “built over a tailings-filled wash, which had once been the principal drainage for a mountain that had been topped by a dozen astrophotometrical telescopes.” In all the above cases, these remarks have no obvious bearing on their stories; they exist only to remind readers of the ruined world in which the stories take place.

But it’s not merely destruction—Williams’s characters are also unexpectedly sensitive to the living environment. One imagines the horror of childhood for a humpback whale: “Imagine after eleven months in the womb to be born to no nest, no lair, no room, but to just the great home shadow of the mother.” Another, a day care worker, reveals a lifelong dream of “visiting the Great Barrier Reef to see the corals releasing their trillions of swirling and dancing eggs and sperm.” Disneyland might be more likely.

Dogs specifically are a focus, most characters cohabiting with them, one claiming to possess a pack five strong (she limits herself only because “more than five would have brought her to the attention of the authorities”). Williams has written tenderly about four-legged friends for decades—notably the German shepherd Clem in Breaking and Entering (1988)—but in some of these new stories, such as the dog-centric retelling of Homeric myth titled “Argos,” she appears to have developed the oversize affection for pets that so commonly accompanies aging. There is something sweet about a figure as dark and austere as Williams writing of doggy heaven: “Often, the ones they have been devoted to are with them, making those human sounds of sorrow and reassurance, stroking and smoothing their fur, promising them that they will not be forgotten.”

Latent environmental themes take center stage in “After the Haiku Period,” a story that merges the principled ecoterrorism of The Quick and the Dead with the quixotic biddies of Williams’s classic story “Traveling to Pridesup” from her 1982 collection Taking Care (in which two crones try to return an infant abandoned on their doorstep, get lost, and die of exposure in the desert). In “After the Haiku Period,” two sisters, Camilla and Candida, reflect on a long-ago revolutionary period that briefly inspired them to contemplate environmentally motivated patricide (“Daddy owned the largest coal-bed-methane drilling company in Wyoming”). Now, after a lifetime of other interests, such as the titular haiku period, they’ve circled back to revolution—deciding to take violent, decisive action on behalf of the environment. Summoning their chauffeur, they request that he drive to the nearest slaughterhouse. He asks whether they might prefer to visit a larger one a few miles further away. They decline. “You know why this is so easy for us?” Camilla asks on the drive. “Because it’s right.” She’s wrong. It’s easy because they are carefree—too old for any possible punishment to matter, lives of wealth and ease already distant in the rearview.

At the factory, they quote Lorca to the Latino slaughterhouse workers and, finding an English speaker, tell him they are there to atone:

“In what way does your presence here atone?” the thin man said. “An atonement is a sacrifice offered, but will it be received? And by whom?” […]

“I believe it will be accepted, yes,” Camilla said.

She’s wrong. Soon after, she’s dead, her head blown off by the police. But she doesn’t get a final celestial moment. This story doesn’t end with her; instead, a factory worker provides the strange final note. The killing of the aged environmentalists has reminded her of another day at work: “There were these two frozen hogs in a big pile of frozen chainsawed hogs but they were alive. […] Both of them were saying, ‘You got to do something to help me …’ I’ll never forget them. Or those ladies neither, now I think.” Animals, for Williams, are our equals, their pain no less sharp than our own, and their eyes no dimmer. For her, it is not necessarily a foolish idea to value a pack of German shepherds over family. A hog feels just as much horror in the face of death as an ex-debutante.

Throughout the stories in The Pelican Child, death and environmental destruction are the two truly inescapable facts of modern life. In the story “Baba Iaga & the Pelican Child,” Williams suggests that they are one and the same. Baba Iaga, the woodland witch of Eastern European folklore, lives in fairy-tale land with an enchanted host of talking animals—a dog, a cat, and the titular pelican child. One day, John James Audubon, the American naturalist, comes with a sketchbook, eager to draw the pelican child. “My name is synonymous with beautiful birds,” he says. Baba Iaga is curious; she feels guilty about raising the pelican child in the woods, and Audubon’s drawings are beautiful. So she agrees. Audubon shoots the pelican child with his pistol and carries her away for study. At his abandoned campsite, Iaga and company look with horror at his ornithological collection: “Long nails thrust through their small bodies kept them erect, and thread and wire held their heads up and kept their wings aloft.”

In Williams’s third novel, Breaking and Entering, Willie and Liberty, a couple, recall “the summer that someone was mutilating the pelicans […] capturing the birds, slicing off half their bills with a saw, and releasing them.” It’s a perversion of the biblical story in which “the iconical pelican […] returns to its nest to find its young dead. Slashing its breast with its beak in grief, it draws blood which brings the young back to life.” To kill a pelican, as Audubon does, is both to murder and to preclude resurrection as well. Or, to put it in plainer environmentalist terms, Williams is arguing that killing animals causes death, pain, and suffering while it destroys the renewing power of the natural world—it is not merely death but also an end to life.

At the end of “Baba Iaga & the Pelican Child,” Baba Iaga asks her little family: “Do you wish to become human beings, for some think you are under a hellish spell. Do you want to become human?” “No,” say the dog and cat. And so it goes for Williams. She has lost belief not just in a boundaryless human future but even in humanity itself. Our dwindling Anthropocene was not a period of progress, or enlightenment, just some hellish spell. And we, humanity, will soon be gone into the celestial—where we long to go.