Opening with a powerful story of a woman who quits fighting and her children who will survive, “The Great Black Shape in the Water” sets the tone for this book of short stories. Themes of family, yearning, adolescence, and betrayal dominate this collection of twelve stories set in the American West. The first story, which opens with a fantastic tale of a struggle between a beached whale and the big hips and biceps of a Quilhwa mother, takes place in a native fishing and logging community somewhere on the Olympic Peninsula.

In the collection, the characters travel –- riding in a purple “girl truck” through Montana at the end of fire season; sneaking onto an Indian reservation for a secret teenage rendezvous; steering a motorboat to a dead-end hostess job at a marina restaurant at an Idaho resort; day-tripping into another native coastal community, this time by a rich white couple looking to buy a whale skeleton for their McMansion foyer; bumping along with a blue-eyed daughter in a pickup going sixty-five headed for a Colorado penitentiary; swimming offshore, following your dream girl too far from a cold and rocky beach; and, in the final story, coasting down a mountain ridge in your dad’s black limousine after getting stuck on the top with a teenage girl.

The stories’ language evokes the West– gray, rocky coastlines, pear orchards, myrtlewood stumps, an obsidian egg. For anyone that’s spent time in the Northwest, Williams’ landscapes will be familiar. Some of the scenes reminded me of David Guterson, especially his novel of fruit-pickers in Eastern Washington – East of the Mountains.

The characters’ dialogue is minimal and realistic and Williams writes with a pathos and respect for all, the brainwashed hippie chicks, the suffering mothers, and the teenage boys who won’t ever get the girl they dreamt of.
There is sadness and yearning here that match the grey open spaces we live in. This is an excellent first collection.
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