With prose of indiscriminate radiance, Williams creates a landscape for [the tales in Taking Care] at once geographic and spiritual….

These stories seem closest in spirit to the fictions of Flannery O'Connor and Joyce Carol Oates. Madness, murder, the surrender of hope become commonplace rather than extreme behaviors, and even those characters who sustain the ability to love seem perplexed, even encumbered, by their triumph….

Williams' characters lack grounding, and the stories purpose-fully withhold any larger frames of reference which might accommodate, explain, help contain the formlessness of subjective life. In Taking Care, the world seems to exist only as each character imagines it to be. No person's reality is like another's, each man and woman and child dreams his or her own life. In "The Shepherd," a dog breeder observes: "We are all asleep and dreaming, you know. If we could actually comprehend our true position, we...