From all accounts, Breece Pancake was severely locked into both categories of the dreamer and the resigned. Much of the tension in [The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake] seems to come from his desire to leave his home territory and his surrender to the overwhelming pull of the land, the people, and the expectations that are passed down through families. This tension imbued him with an unflinching and painful awareness of where he came from that, I think, makes these stories exceptional.

Many of the inhabitants in this collection have a bond with the land that goes much deeper than the topsoil that provides them with their livings. They consider the very fossils in the rocks a part of their own history. Every worn wooden shack in every hollow seems to have a glass case full of arrowheads, fossils and rocks. In "Trilobites," a young man troubled by the death of his father and the imminent sale of the hill farm he grew up on takes comfort in the local geography….

By the end of this story, the farm has been sold, the mother challenged, the girlfriend alienated, and the main character, Colly, can feel his "fear moving away in rings through time for a million years."

Many of these stories ("In the Dry," "The First Day of Winter," "The Mark," "The Honored Dead," "The Salvation of Me") offer characters coping with the results of remaining or not remaining in the poor hilltowns and hollows where they were born and raised.

In "Hollow," one of the best and bleakest stories depicting a cold day in the life of a young strip miner, there is no question of getting away. Though this is a brutal, sad, and cold story, it is also one of the most unflinching and richest evocations of a world that I've read lately. What lifts Breece Pancake's best stories into solid, moving literary experiences is his attention to atmosphere. Detailed descriptions of the mechanics of daily living—from gaffing and butchering a turtle to working a strip mine—work hand in hand with an intense awareness of nature and weather and an exceptional ear for dialogue and dialects to produce a powerful sense of place that is rare in contemporary fiction.

Breece Pancake is not one of those writers one comes to for explications of human feeling and motivation. For the most part people are driven and imprisoned by pasts they don't understand. Human hurt is expressed in cryptic phrases, enigmatic turns of dialogue, suggestion and atmosphere. There are plenty of skeletons to stock family closets, and often a subtle spoken word can do as much damage as a bullet.

For those who like their literature with equal parts empathy for women as for men, these stories may be a challenge at times. Most of the time is spent in the world of young men, of hunting, cars, farm machinery, best friends, animal blood, violence and a generally adolescent attitude toward the opposite sex. Women are mostly confined to the roles of "mother" and "whore" or some compromise between the two. One gets the feeling, however, that Breece Pancake struggled valiantly with these choices. Again and again, his main characters try to squeeze as much humanity as they can out of the choices that are offered them. Again and again, they are defeated—albeit sometimes willingly—by a culture and tradition as formidable and inescapable as the hills and hollows that hold them….

Though Breece's suicide casts a shadow over these stories, I think it is paying him the ultimate compliment to say that it really doesn't matter here. Like fossils formed over millions of years by enormous pressures in a single place, these stories have the polished, purged, hardwon qualities that will insure that they last far longer than the flesh that once inhabited them.