Nearly People
Conrad Williams
PS Publishing, 2001
Limited 300 hardcover
78 pages
$40.00

The hardcover for this novella has thick, white paper—very easy on the eyes—but average boards and signature sheet, with both numbers written in red ink. The cover art is by Wieslaw Walkuski and it suits the content. In his introduction to this novella, Michael Marshall Smith points out that hunger is what drives the protagonist in Williams’ story: first, the hunger for food, the physical need; second, the hunger for enlightenment, the spiritual need. Overall, this theme—the physical to the spiritual—is handled well. But there is a distinct transition and that bothered me. We do not go gracefully from one realm to the other in this surreal story. In only a couple of pages spiritual hunger supplants physical need—to the point that you actually wonder if the main character, Carrier, no longer needs to eat. One minute she’s hunting for dog, the next, she’s doing yoga. This transition was far too abrupt for me, as was the loss of her companion and the way in which Carrier seems to even forget him, though she’s been caring for him, literally, for months. I enjoyed the novella for what it tries to do—Williams is a good writer—and feel it succeeds to a point, but I think it needed a dozen more pages to allow the reader to gradually adjust to the need for spiritual fulfillment. Those who have read Williams’ The Unblemished will find the same bleak struggle within the distinct confines of a surreal cityscape here, which is haunting in its own way.