[In the following brief review of the short stories in Follow Me Home, Carter deems the tales to be carefully constructed, humorous, and compelling, but denounces Hoffman for the fact that some of the stories and dialogue seem contrived.]

“We read to know we're not alone,” says a character in the recent film, Shadowlands. Literature comforts us with the knowledge that others share our doubts and fears, our disappointments and heartaches. And it extends this comfort by letting us enter the lives of others and experience the secret longings and broken dreams that stand us on common ground.

It is this function of literature that William Hoffman, a Virginian and former Hampden-Sydney College professor, so capably fulfills in his third collection of stories [Follow Me Home]. A master craftsman of empathy, Hoffman immerses us in the lives of characters we would shun on the street and makes us care about them.

Beau, the aptly named protagonist of “Points,” is an insufferable snob whose son “considers civility a nuisance.” A horseman whose bank balance has seen better days, Beau fears being cut from the “February Frolic,” fox hunt and, to his son's disgust, toadies up to those who control the invitation list. Nevertheless, when the chips are down, Beau acquits himself honorably, holding to a higher standard of civility and causing us to rally round him and eschew his son.

“Night Sport” is about a bitter, foul-mouthed Vietnam vet, a paraplegic, with whom—when he explodes into violence of a particularly chilling sort—we are ready to identify (and perhaps, in some secret part of our hearts, applaud).

Hoffman at times demonstrates a comic touch, as in “Abide With Me,” a story about a coal miner who sculpts an image of the Christ-like figure who appeared to him in a hospital vision and saved him from “the foul dog of death.” Predictably, his creation alienates the fundamentalist churchgoers in his community. But, perhaps just as inevitably, he winds up in trouble with feminists, the NAACP, the ACLU, the Jewish Defense League, and the county building inspector, as well.

“Coals” is the story of a clever black housemaid (“They like it when I dumb … Make them feel smarter. They feel smarter, they treat me better.”) who gains the upper hand over her crabbed and shrewish employer and, in the process, gives her a life.

Set in the hills of West Virginia, on the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries, and in Virginia’s small towns and big cities, Hoffman's stories are carefully constructed—in fact, so carefully that now and then they seem a bit contrived. His prose flows like the rivers and streams he so often describes, but his dialogue (although he has a gift for mimicry) occasionally fails to ring true, most noticeably when a frightened fraternity pledge in “Night Sport” attempts to placate the veteran whose space he has invaded.

Despite such minor flaws, Hoffman's stories will strike a note of recognition in any reader. His 10 novels and two previous story collections have earned awards and praise from the critics but have totted up only modest sales figures. He deserves a wider audience. His work brims with life.