The Joy of Joy

I'm starting to understand Joy Williams a bit more-- I just finished The Quick and the Dead and her fragmented moments and motifs are starting to make sense; Annabel, Alice, and Corvus are three precocious girls linked by grief-- all of them have lost parents to terrible tragedy-- and they wander through a nameless desert town-- volunteering at a grim nursing home, forging strange relationships with older people, navigating a big game hunter's taxidermy museum . . . and all through, the living and the dead interact, and man and nature push against each other in strange oppressive ways . . . once again, the world is on the verge of something apocalyptic and these girls realize this more than the adults who are blinder by their petty thoughts.