[The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake displays fiction] that offers the deep pleasure of art created out of the need to transform suffering…. These twelve stories are all we will ever have from [Pancake], but they may well be read for generations to come.

While [Bobbie Ann Mason's characters in her initial volume, Shiloh and Other Stories,] are sociological types, Pancake's are individuals who act out of the kinds of necessity present in our own lives. We are not tourists in his fiction, but residents. Pancake's characters, like Mason's, belong to rural America. Mason's territory, though, is a gentle Kentucky, overrun by K-Marts and Datsun dealerships; Pancake's is West Virginia—hard, rocky and infertile, carved out of land five other states didn't want. From this damp and chilly landscape, from failing farms and young men who leave them to work as miners or truckdrivers or gas-station attendants, Pancake creates stories that are as carefully (and wittily) observed as any of Mason's. For him, however, the social and family dramas, the inescapable situations, are not simply performances. As in classic tragedy, his heroes' failures affirm the absolute value of what they've lost.

Colly, the hero of "Trilobites," has collected rocks and fossils since childhood. He has lived all his life on his father's farm, but he has no talent for farming ("Couldn't grow pole beans in a pile of horseshit," he says to himself). He is connected to the land by his passion for its geological secrets. Colly's father is dead, his mother is about to sell the farm to a developer and move to Ohio, and his emotional grounding has been shaken loose. (pp. 345-46)

Pancake's language brings Colly alive; we join him in his loneliness….

Colly's isolation does not collapse into a meaningless alienation. His decision at the end of the story to become a railroad bum is a decision, not a sad fade-out. Hedged all around by circumstance, Colly is not a victim of circumstance.

This ability to choose Pancake gives to all his characters, even in the bleakest story, "First Day of Winter," in which the protagonist, Hollis, accepts a kind of living death as the caretaker of his aging parents. Although Hollis's despair is absolute, he is also the man who provides the squirrel meat for Thanksgiving dinner, and his fate does not appear to be out of his own hands. Like tragic heroes, when Pancake's characters can't choose anything else, they choose their own losses….

Pancake's stories take place in a country where men kill animals and fight each other. They expect to have blood on their hands, and they expect women to bear children. It is a measure of his seriousness that Pancake's own consciousness is not befuddled by his material. Only "The Mark" has a woman as the main character, but she is solidly at the center. In the end, the weight of Reva's sorrow makes the same claim on our hearts as Colly's, and she too chooses her loss, burning down the lockhouse, the private life of her childhood.

The stories are all sad, yet they are not heavy or gloomy because we are always aware of the pleasure Pancake takes in their details. The real art of these stories is in the counterpoint between Pancake's intimacy with his characters and the almost playful detachment of his description. Reva watches a man at the fair who swallows snakes for a living. Colly lets a little turtle blood spray on the developer's pants. (p. 346)

Pancake's stories are undecorated, but they have plenty of room to notice the way a piece of land dries out in the summer and the way a field looks after frost; how a crippled man sits in a wheelchair with his hands bunched in his lap; or how it feels to scrape your knuckles under the hood of a car in the cold. They are attentive to the way headlights in the dark show up the highway steam, "making the road give birth to little ghosts beneath his feet." Because we know we can trust Pancake on these and hundreds of other details, we trust him not to abandon us in the dark forest of his characters' inner lives. (pp. 346-47)