Some writing comes from the ego, some from the id. Breece Pancake is one of those writers who burst on the world with great promise, publishing his story “Trilobites” in The Atlantic in 1977, but left in great sorrow, shooting himself. His brief oeuvre is all id: rough and random and sometimes irrational. It is often hard to tell whom the main character in these stories is talking to, his dogs or his woman (both are called “her” or “she”).

One story begins from the point of view of a possum, scurrying to get her babies across the road. The characters are “crackers,” low-class whites in West Virginia. Some of their values—tolerant of sex with minors, or jokes about sex with minors, or racism—are so distasteful. It's not a question of being PC or not PC; something just smells bad. Women are always leaving in these stories; in fact, there's nothing close to love as we know it. There's regret and guilt and silence and shyness but no love. Life is hard when nothing is put into words, and even the landscape reflects that emptiness. “The passing of an autumn night left no mark on the patchwork blacktop.”

In his afterword, Andre Dubus III speculates that Pancake was ashamed of his people, and it's true: He paints with the colors of shame. Nothing is spoken; everything is ominous: “On a knoll in the ridge, run there by the dogs, the bobcat watched, waiting for the man to leave.” We may be mean, but there's something even meaner out there.