[In the following brief review, Carter offers a positive evaluation of the stories in Doors.]

Few writers have an ear so finely attuned to the pulsebeat of a place as William Hoffman. In the 10 stories collected here [in Doors], all of which appeared previously in prestigious literary quarterlies, Hoffman creates a rich and lovingly detailed tapestry that encapsulates the life of Southside Virginia from its fox-hunting elite to its harried tobacco farmers, confident “come-heres,” and watermen (or, in this case, waterwomen). In the spare, precise prose that is his hallmark, Hoffman accomplishes feats of storytelling legerdemain that might well serve as a textbook for aspiring writers.

A case in point is the story “Stones,” an O. Henry prize-winner that delineates the curious combination of social progress and cultural stasis that permeates the rural South. “Stones” is about a young boy, Chris, the son of a Norfolk Southern switchman, confronting what is, to him, the inexplicable behavior of a mysterious black man who has become the owner of a house once the centerpiece of a 3,000-acre tobacco plantation.

In choosing to tell the story from Chris's point-of-view, Hoffman is able to deploy a potent blend of subtlety and dramatic irony that allows us the satisfaction of sighting the truth beyond the boy's confused—and bigoted—perception of things.

Subtlety is Hoffman's long suit. Even a story that points as inevitably toward its conclusion as “Winter Wheat,” about a subsistence farmer whose school-teacher wife betrays him, moves beyond its anticipated ending to leave us pondering the moral ambiguity of its final scene.

Hoffman's preferred modus operandi here is the first-person narrator. In several of those stories, however, the narrator is female, a difficult trick for a male writer to pull off but one that Hoffman manages deftly. He succeeds in assuming the persona of a widowed Episcopalian pricked in her pride by a wily repairman who she thinks, “if he belonged to any denomination at all it had to be some wailing, evangelical sect of rednecks.” And he speaks as well for the marvelous “stubby … rough and rugged” young lady known as Punch, who fishes crab pots for a living and discovers that strength is sometimes found, ironically, in vulnerability.

Hoffman can develop character more fully in a 4,000-word short story than most writers can in the expanse of a full-length novel. And he does so without cutting corners. From the preacher in “Prodigal,” for whom the end justifies the means, to the transplanted Philadelphian of “Humility” who tries gamely to endure church services and sewing circles before achieving a more personal triumph in an ending that will dazzle the unsuspecting reader, Hoffman gives us people caught in complex moral dilemmas that cannot be resolved with platitudes or clichés.

Not so long ago, a new book by a writer with 11 critically acclaimed novels to his credit and three previous story collections would have merited a hardcover edition and a full publicity blitz. Now that publishing has become a branch of the entertainment industry, however, literature must go begging. Readers must be grateful to the University of Missouri for seeing that these 10 stories are preserved in print.