Pancake was totally obsessed with bringing alive the voices of his impoverished West Virginia. Born in the "hollers" of Appalachia, he acquired the crust of a wisecracking hillbilly but underneath he was collapsible: the torment of his life comes up like iron spikes through the twelve stories that his former University of Virginia teachers, James Alan McPherson and John Casey, have collected in this slim volume [The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake]. The reader feels somehow impaled on his prose: frequently a single paragraph (which he rewrote dozens of times) will stand as a kind of parable, spoken in the rough and bewildered voice of the common man. His stories, like his life, are shrouded in mystery. His teachers talk of him as though he shadowed them still; his presence was unerasable in their lives and yet they knew so little about him that neither knows why he died. So do his characters prick our fascination with their ambiguity. (p. 92)

The people Pancake writes about live mean lives in a world oddly colorful and dreary at the same time. There are waitresses with "… hair the same red as a rusty Brillo pad" and there are bloody cockfights, fox hunts, stock shows; we are taken to the tense depths of a coal mine and up to the top of a mountain to stalk deer, but the men that indulge in these rough-and-tumble dramas are sad and introspective, as though they belonged nestled elsewhere, namely inside the author's soul. They are overwhelmed by images of their guilt, about causing accidents or evading the Vietnam war, or by their dreams which tell them they must shake off the past and find a way out of the dead-end poverty of the hills, an exit that the reader somehow knows will never take place. Casey says that Pancake never knew how good he was and this is reflected in the peculiar set of his characters' minds. Sensitive yet afraid, they drift about, tugboat workers, gas pump men, miners, battered like leaves in the wind, always lingering or loitering, swearing to better days while noiselessly accepting their own doom. The short sinewy sentences are pulled so taut they sing with the tension, and the "I" builds slowly in power as it moves to slaughter a deer or make love to a child prostitute or just to bring a dusty hand down on the sheen of a woman's cheek.

Pancake's hillbillies have a preoccupation with looking back and, as the stories progress, memory becomes so urgent that the past invades the present as strongly as events of the moment. (pp. 92-3)

Pancake's fiction is full of violence, particularly the butchering of animals for game and for food, and his life, also ended violently, is a tragic waste for American literature. It is a fitting epitaph that shortly before his suicide, he had a dream that he was in a world full of quail and rabbit and deer which, when you shot them, popped back to life and ran off again. (p. 93)