[In the following review, Reynolds faults Gilchrist's use of detail in The Cabal and Other Stories.]

It's all in the details, they tell you in creative writing 101. What they might forget to tell you is that writing effectively sometimes means relinquishing control. Like characters and plot, details rebel if they are too tightly manipulated by the writer. For extremely talented and experienced writers like Ellen Gilchrist, the dance with detail—background or foreground, minor or plot-shaking, descriptive or context providing—is perilous. In The Cabal and the stories that follow this short novel, a psychiatrist, who holds all the gruesome secrets of the elite citizens in a small Mississippi town, goes crazy, threatening to pull his patients with him. Caroline Jones, a poet and professor, is invited to teach at the university by a close friend, a professor and confidant of the town's high society and is hurled into the center of this unraveling universe. A wonderful plot, but Gilchrist white-knuckles the details: what they wear, what they read, what they possess. It competes with the deeper psychological portraits these stories could create, offering, in the end, intoxication without insight.