Everpresent and inescapable, death creeps onto every page of Joy Williams' insistently surreal, often shockingly off-putting The Quick & The Dead, where the arid Southwest desert either kills the living or haunts them with incessant apparitions. The story centers on an unlikely clique of three dissimilar teenage girls, all left motherless—and for all intents and purposes fatherless—for one unimaginably horrific reason or another. Alice, a virtual embodiment of the novel's twisted conscience, lives with her grandparents and espouses radical beliefs with little provocation. She hates children, air-conditioning, overpopulation, and the wealthy, but militantly protects the environment and animals, staging "puke-ins" at restaurants that serve veal and "liberating" animals from pet stores. But she's also full of odd contradictions, like a seething contempt for cats that leads her to try to kill them with a slingshot. On the other end of the spectrum, there's Annabel, a well-heeled and shallow debutante type who lives in a cavernous mansion with her father, whose dead wife torments him nightly with vicious insults and teasing lies about the afterlife. More believable than the other two, though also more tragic, Corvus copes with her parents' freak drowning and an angry neighbor who lynches her sad, howling dog. With a grim sensibility that's earned her comparisons to Flannery O'Connor, Williams has little interest in smooth narrative rhythms or even a consistent voice, opting instead for random, discordant jolts as powerful as they are alienating. At her best, she paints a vividly bizarre landscape full of frightening and bleakly amusing surprises, such as a drifter with a dead lab monkey in his head and a nursing home populated by zombie-like grotesques. Though a halting, fitfully difficult read, The Quick & The Dead finds, among its endless parade of corpses, rough-hewn beauty and even a faint, redemptive whiff of optimism.