Concerning the Future of Souls by Joy Williams (2024)

Am I funny? Writing gives me no happiness, I've said this before, but once I told a group that a sentence I wrote in a story called “Hammer” made me laugh. A man had a pet beaver who lived in his house in its own little house made of twigs. “When you broke bread with my friend you broke bread with that beaver.” There was silence. 

—Joy Williams, interview with VICE, 2016

Threaded by interactions between the psychopomp Azrael (“He had four thousand wings. […] He also had a thousand eyes but not, as has been rumored, four heads”) and the Devil (“[a] little piece of God caught inside him like a fish bone”), Concerning the Nature of Souls is a sequel of sorts to Joy Williams’s 2016 collection, Ninety-Nine Stories of God. It’s also a continued meditation on many of the concerns about environmental destruction, humanity (see: our failures), and spirituality she raises in her sole collection of essays, Ill Nature. Any long-time reader of Williams will immediately recognize the dark humor in this new book—a kind of banal, terror-flavored sadness. 

But Williams’s chops are as sharp as ever; she doesn’t let her thesis water down the work. For example, in #26, a nameless person looks in the freezer for “integrity raised beef,”

But there was nothing. No remnant of frolicsome calf raised to prime by loving kindergartners, petted a hundred times a day by tiny hands, fed flowers and clover, surrounded by her most loyal and affectionate and trusted of caregivers, the ones who had named her and taught her to know that name was hers. No Tunnel of Death, no blood-slick and reeking duckboards. […] Just a last embrace in a lush and sunny field and the sound of little children’s piping voices. Not a whiff of terror or foreboding in the air for her.

The description here isn’t elaborate, but it’s compelling and complete. It’s terrible, in fact. Not in the quality of the prose, but the implications. Indeed, we learn Azrael transports the souls of animals in #70, “but unlike humankind they would fear no further judgment.” The story, titled “Hemera,” doesn’t end here though:

But the last of Hemera, raised by Mrs. Ricky Hormel’s advanced preschool class of Hopewell, New Jersey, was not in the freezer. He must have finished it off some time ago and just forgotten.

What was once a beloved cow named Hemera (in Greek mythology, Hemera is the goddess of daylight) becomes an “it,” less than an afterthought. This is reflective of a certain disposability that permeates American culture and an even deeper suggestion that the divine/holy is not immune to human intervention.

But this is just one of many stories that demand pause at its conclusion. How do we heal the earth and our souls? In a recent interview with The New York Times, Williams says: “[W]e need an enormous shift in our manner of being and thinking—a change of heart and conscience. Fiction’s role in effecting this change is large but it must become less familiar, more lexically and spiritually daring.” Maybe that’s why the last story in Concerning the Future of Souls is the shortest. #99 is titled “Dugong” and is composed of one sentence. “Dugong.” 4.5 out of 5 sacs of blood.

—Nate Logan