Skull Fragments: Noir Stories

The 14 tales in Thriller Award–winner Williams’s first story collection make definitive end-of-winter reading for those not already depressed enough by the weather. Set largely in and around the fictional burg of Greenview in Harps County, Ky., on the banks of the real Green River, the stories follow a cavalcade of losers haunted by oxy, meth, and broken dreams. The mines have closed, and the world is populated by traveling salesmen, grifters, hookers, and their prey. The more ambitious characters have sex slaves, dead or alive, imprisoned in a shed or trailer or bomb shelter. One particular image sums it up: “Other days when she felt particularly blue, she’d imagine her mother lying in a ditch beside a ribbon of asphalt, hidden from passing cars by waist-high weeds, the flies and beetles crawling over her staring eyes.” For those who can’t get enough noir where nobody wins, this is perfect. (Mar.)