When a troubled young woman is the sole witness to her cousin’s shocking death, she’s brought to her aunt’s "planned jungle" in a New Orleans courtyard to confront a family that is intensely interested in having her lurid tale silenced. In his richest, boldest poetical flourishes, Williams creates, in the words of Walter Kerr, "a concrete and blistering portrait of loneliness…of the sudden snapping of that spider’s web that is one man’s life, of ultimate panic and futile flight.