Concerning the Future of Souls: 99 Stories of Azrael
By Joy Williams
Tin House, 176 pages, $22.95
The writer Joy Williams, whose latest book, Concerning the Future of Souls: 99 Stories of Azrael, was published July 2, has become one of our foremost scribes of environmental destruction and the moral and spiritual questions it raises. Animals and the environment have long been a Williams preoccupation. She published a book of polemics, Ill Nature: Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals, in 2001, a volume filled with disturbing, heartbreaking detail of animal mistreatment and ecological degradation. Her most recent novel, Harrow, published in 2021, is more measured but bleaker. It depicts a post-environmental-apocalypse world in which “the incomprehensible beauty of nature was no more” and in which all remaining meaning and social structure have been drained from human life as a consequence. Harrow’s narrator is possibly dead, a meta implication as to the status of all humanity if the Earth is entering its endgame.
Concerning the Future of Souls develops the concept, moving entirely to the terrain of the afterlife, and discussing the final judgment of humankind. I have reservations about some of Williams’s premises, but she is one of our greatest living writers, renowned especially as a master of the short story. She presents her worldview in 99 mysterious, metaphysical, often blackly funny entries that add up to a brutal but plausible depiction of the value of human achievement, and a theory on what happens to us when it all goes dark.