The Quick and the Dead

An eclectic cast of characters confronts death—their own and others–with whatever means they have available in Joy Williams' bold novel The Quick and the Dead. Carter, a widower, continues a resentful relationship with the ghost of his ex-wife, Ginger, while their teenage daughter Annabel builds a shrine out of Ginger's used napkins and lipstick. Annabel navigates her grief and the surrounding American southwest desert landscape with her fellow motherless girlfriends, the charmingly morbid Corvus and Alice. Williams spares no one from her black humor, and doesn't hesitate to expose each character's emotional shortcomings even in moments of tragedy. Annabel tries to circumvent her grief with grooming rituals. Alice pesters everyone with outraged updates about the decaying environment. And Corvus burns down her own house and afterwards spends months in a catatonic daze. Yet Williams' cartoonish flair for the macabre also makes these goings-on as funny as they are frightening. There's no saving the living from their incompetent copings with death in The Quick and the Dead and, in the end, Williams seems to suggest that death itself is the only factor that unifies these disparate characters.