Breece David John Pancake was blessed or cursed with the true creative gift. In 1979 he called off his experiment with life, just as he was coming into full possession of his talent. At least for the time being, those facts of biography are likely to dominate responses to his work. The elegiac note has already crept into early reviews of this remarkable first and last book of stories [The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake], and it informs the memorial essays contributed by James Alan McPherson and John Casey to the extent that the fiction, which only yesterday startled Casey with its quality, is left all but unremarked. Probably that is as it should be. There are things that must be said about loss, confusion, and pain; art can take care of itself. The linked mysteries of creativity and death may initially heighten the appeal of Pancake's pages, but readers will return to them for their sureness and variety of character, their clarity of life imagined and made known. Everything else is unreclaimable now.

The stories, an even dozen of them, are written in a sparse, hard-boiled regional vernacular and are often aggressively masculine in posture. McPherson properly notes the influence of Hemingway. To that might be added the storytelling to be heard in diners, union halls, bars—wherever working people gather—and, to a lesser extent, such half-forgotten classics of working-stiff literature as Tom Kromer's Waiting for Nothing, the rhythms and idiom of which Pancake frequently echoes. Occasionally the dominant realism is relieved by the grotesquerie of the emerging moralist. Almost without exception, the fiction is set among the hills or along the highways of the West Virginia mining country during the latter years of the war in Vietnam, which is the only public event to play any appreciable part in establishing circumstances or motive. Here the sense of time tends less to the historical than the geological.

The protagonist of the stories is commonly a spiritual brother of the generic Poor Boy of lore and song, who countless times over bid that gal adieu, caught the next freight out, and eventually fell upon hard times in the generic Cryderville Jail. Pancake's character, always intimately particularized, has all the native rebelliousness, ingenuity, and wild, bitter wit of his folk prototype—the spunk, animal stubbornness, and chronic bad luck, too. What he often lacks is the Poor Boy's careless mobility. One key symbol in a book much given to symbolism is the useless or crippled vehicle, especially the rusting Impala, unrepairable and attracting snakes, which in two stories sits in the protagonist's back yard. As he works on it with a kind of furious despair, it shapes a dream of freedom, which in his world consists essentially of one's ability to move on down the road.

Pancake published only a few stories, not always his best, during his lifetime, and this volume was assembled chiefly by John Casey, who dedicated time and affection to sorting through manuscripts, many of which were the tentative efforts of an artist still discovering his own voice. Inevitably, then, the book contains some apprentice work that might have been left uncollected if its author had lived. Yet even faulty material is redeemed by Pancake's precision of setting and empathic delight in character. “Time and Again,” for example, is based upon a farfetched symbolic premise which ultimately defuses its action, but it holds the attention for its evocation of the view at night from the cab of a mountain snowplow and its transcription of the querulous, sad, disturbingly human voice of the madman behind the wheel.

At its best, the fiction needs no disclaimers or explanations. In such stories as “Trilobites,” “The Mark,” and “In the Dry,” Breece Pancake, in his mid-twenties, was sounding mighty themes: the violations and legacies of the fathers, the vertigo of sexual knowledge, the bitter passage from boyhood to manhood, the intersections of personal and collective time. Above all, he wrote repeatedly, passionately of what St. Paul called “the mystery of iniquity,” almost as if he were the first to recognize its power. His stories gravitate naturally, probably not always fully consciously, to a secular analogue of the myth of the fall from innocence. They assume some primal act of blood or lust, its specific nature usually only suggested, which leaves men (in particular) to work their bodies into animal exhaustion in a blasted land. Pancake's dry farms, mines, and truck stops are marked by an essentially human condition, but the moral darkness infiltrates his sense of the natural world as well: “The passing of an autumn night left no mark on the patchwork blacktop of the secondary road that led to Parkins. A gray ooze of light began to crest the eastern hills above the hollow and sift a blue haze through the black bowels of linking oak branches. A small wind shivered, and sycamore leaves chattered across the pavement but were stopped by the fighting-green orchard grass on the berm.” (“Fox Hunters”)

Except as it may shed light on Pancake's imagination and his surprising conversion to Catholicism, that mythic and symbolic dimension is in itself purely neutral. It is the measure of his talent that the outline and force of his myths are inherent in the precisely rendered details of his regional portrait of a tough, dogged, sardonic people. Under his hand, the penalty of the Fall—that we eat our bread in the sweat of our brows—is literalized and amplified. He is persistently curious about work and other hard physical activity: how it is done, how one's muscles feel afterward, what one looks and smells like, and how it all saps the spirit. His working people belong to the class at the bottom and on the fringes of an industrial society; they are truck drivers, strip miners, mechanics, short-order cooks, dirt farmers, bootleggers, waitresses, prostitutes. Their fundamental lawlessness and desperation are reflected in their recreations, which consist of hunting, pool-shooting, drinking, adultery, various forms of fighting, and driving at breakneck speeds on mountain roads. Despite the relief of Pancake's own wry humor, their explosions of play are without much gaiety or relaxation. In the aggregate they comprise a raffish, to some degree degenerate community, established on strictly human and naturalistic terms, which enacts and reenacts a moral drama to which it remains insensitive.

During crises, however, Pancake's protagonists sometimes seem on the verge of becoming aware of what it means to be fallen. At such moments, the psychic or physical violence to which they expose themselves answers their dumb need to be purged of the conviction of guilt, and the stories assume the character of parables in which familiar meanings are inverted or otherwise frustrated. Colly, the narrator of “Trilobites,” remembers his father's death, one of the obsessive elements in his crisis of maturity, in suggestive but inconclusive terms: “He had lain spread-eagled in the thick grass after a sliver of metal from his old wound passed to his brain. I remember thinking how beaten his face looked with prints on it from the grass.” Later he associates that memory with his ties to the land:

I lean back, try to forget these fields and flanking hills. A long time before me or these tools, the Teays flowed here. I can almost feel the cold waters and the tickling the trilobites make when they crawl. All the water from the old mountains flowed west. But the land lifted. I have only the bottoms and the stone animals I collect. I blink and breathe. My father is a khaki cloud in the canebrakes, and Ginny [his girl] is no more to me than the bitter smell in the blackberry briers up on the ridge.

From this jumble of sense impression, personal memory, and nature mysticism Colly intuits a conviction about how the tyrannies of domestic life and geological time conspire against a man. He feels able to respond to their challenge only with a fierce gesture toward what he perceives as freedom, but which may instead be a first step in repeating the experience of his father, whose travels eventually returned him home to farm his ancient, barren hills. Pancake allows for the possibility, but noncommittally, and Colly himself is alert to it. “I know,” he says, as if warding off a curse, “his mistake was coming back here to set that locust-tree post on the knob.”

By the end of “Trilobites” Colly, like a few of Pancake's other introspective protagonists, has learned something of the compulsions in his own nature and is relaxing some of his fear of freedom. He is morally and emotionally suspended between archaic and personal time, guilt and self-forgiveness, emulation and responsibility; his future is a mystery to everyone, including his author. The tensions of his story are resolved only to the extent that he recognizes and accepts his own necessary indeterminacy and orphanhood. It is to such moments of radical possibility that Pancake's imagination is most powerfully drawn. We might not be wrong to suggest that he does not always have their implications fully under control or that they seem to correspond too well to what we can guess about his own dilemmas. But his integrity and power reside in the steadfastness with which he refuses either to adjust their terms or to look away from them. His vision was as generous as it was dangerous; his book testifies that it was not wasted.