A desert island library would need some lighter moments, and this would be a fine choice. The stories in Williams’ debut collection are not merely ‘drunk on prose’: they have swallowed a whole shelf of dictionaries and are now working their way from optic to optic, necking books of proverbs, puns, and rhetorical devices with gay abandon. (Having had the pleasure of twice interviewing the author, her obsession with dictionaries and lexicography would, I hope, make her proud of that description.)
It’s like reading a Dundee cake while drinking a pint of port, and the linguistic fireworks are hard not to enjoy. Like many of her stories, Bs is a riot of possibilities, interrogations, quandaries and definitions, a brain obsessively and almost manically playing word-association with itself – and that ‘with itself’ is important. Many of Williams’ stories focus on misunderstandings or failures of communication (or failure to communicate). Imagine Fawlty Towers if Stephen Fry had taken the helm. The best approach is simply to surrender to the joy of a writer so utterly in love with words and what they can do, but who can leave you smiling at a moment of very human fallibility and tenderness at the same time. Stories can bring you delight as well as broken hearts, after all.
Published in Attrib. and other stories, Influx Press, 2017
A Personal Anthology 