[In "Boy with a Trumpet" Rhys Davies] mines his boyhood and background thoroughly with skill and success. It is obvious that many of the tales represent a fictional treatment of actual incidents; there is the terror of small-town reality in them…. Plot, as the professional storyteller knows it, does not exist for Mr. Davies; he exposes raw material, examines it and leaves it; he does not even offer a use, morally or sentimentally, for what he exhibits. His writing, therefore, is almost reportorial, except that by cunning selection and delicate emphasis it enters the field of art.

There is a single point of view in all of Mr. Davies's stories; he is objectively compassionate, concerned with the tragedy of every human life, but without indignation or regret for the inevitable action which reduces human aspirations to ashes. In the title story a boy raised in an orphanage longs for the death of the world so that he may return to the womb of life. He knows that his only hope of a normal life lies in finding a mother; when the prostitute he elevates to this position brutally rejects him Mr. Davies does nothing more than describe the sunlight on the bed in the room and the cracks in the paint on the wall. That is all there is, he seems to say, and there is nothing you can do about it. He is as noncommittal in "Resurrection," a nakedly terrible episode in which an invalid woman recovers from "death" and tries to get out of her casket, only to be shoved back by her angry sisters and an irritated undertaker. For brutal realism, however, the stories of Welsh miners stand out like thumb-screws on a torture rack. So insensitive are these men, so overwhelmingly animal, that were it not for their women they would be ludicrous caricatures of humanity. But their women, for whom Mr. Davies has tearless but gigantic pity, suffer day by day and night by night more anguish than Dante's souls in hell. In one short piece, "Nightgown," everything that can be said about a sensitive woman living with insensitive men is said.

There is a wry smile here and there in the stories, but mostly they are sheer tragedy, clean and quickly done, with the blood scooped up and carried quickly away, so that no one in the nameless little Welsh town where all the deeds take place and where life is a nightmare of need and want and greed, will know it has happened, though of course everyone does know it has happened, and no one will ever forget it. Mr. Davies is an artist of the small town; his specialty is the cruelty of the human heart in such a town; his stories are so true that they cause physical pain.