In The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake, we can sense the sort of geographical despair that could drive a person to self-extinction: human life is closed in upon, almost crushed between ragged slopes of landscape, almost lost in the hollows between the rises. There is so much violence in this setting, so much bleak, gun-metal despair. It thrives in the mines, in such stories as "Hollow"; in the off-time thrills of cockfighting (and man-fighting) in "The Scrapper"; and in the simply dark and perverse private lives of the people, as in "The Mark."

However, the best stories are those in which men and women strive for a momentary redemption, for an ascension out of the emotional morass that tugs at their heels. In "Trilobites," a young man stares out across a valley at the glint from a copper roof; the roof, like the woman who lives beneath it, stands as a symbol, a hope almost as distant as the expanse of bottomland that stretches from eye to hillside. He seeks the woman's love—or at least her recognition of that love—but what he achieves is the mere function of that love, the sexual possession. Authentic love is an emotion that has been fossilized, pressed, and preserved by the vast weights of time and earth and isolation; it exists only as artifact….

What stands out in all of these stories is the sheer pain of this life. Characters walk about with their hearts torn out, bare gaping wounds like the yawning mouths of mines. So much emotion is expended, and expended wastefully, as bodies heave down on bodies, forcing their pain upon others, that we can almost understand the inward intensity of feeling Pancake himself understood and, tragically, never seemed to outlive.