Neighbors by Zach Williams, 2024
The magic trick:
A story that is “just scary enough”
We continue our week of Zach Williams stories. I happened upon a review of Williams’s Beautiful Days in the Chicago Review of Books by Nathan Blum, and headline calls the collection “just scary enough.”
And I just think that is such a wonderful description of the stories in the collection. Absolutely spot on. And “Neighbors” is, I believe, an excellent example.
In “Neighbors,” we have a man who has just moved to San Francisco with his wife. They’re kind of starting over their lives, maybe starting over their marriage after a little bit of infidelity in their previous stop. And events conspire, as they sometimes do, to put the man inside his elderly neighbor’s house doing a wellness check as a favor for her worried son, who has not heard from her in a number of days.
So a lot of that, obviously, is rooted in what we would consider to be normal life. Relatable, typical concerns. But things do get a little bit weird, and you might say, just scary enough to make us interested. Make us nervous, and propel us to look deeper into what the story might be saying about this man and our lives in this relatable normalcy. And that’s quite a trick on Williams’s part.
The selection:
Her own house was an embarrassment: squat and shingled, peeling turquoise, with a glaring tin roof. One winter, an accumulation of cottonwood leaves and fallen-in chimney bricks plugged the heater vent, so that Marly and Jeanette both got dangerous, woozy headaches from the fumes. The landlord was ancient—he appeared every August in the fair parade, a spindly old farmer piloting a goat cart. Jeanette couldn’t stand the sight of him. “We’re absolutely not spending another month in this hellhole,” she told Manly periodically. Yet they never moved.
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