Though not one of the best-known of contemporary black writers, Gayl Jones can claim distinction as the teller of the most intense tales. Her stories are powerful depictions of madness and violence in the lives of black people, especially women. And since she chooses to allow these women to narrate their own experiences, she effectively shows the insanity and violence from the inside, as it were. In these voices, we hear the troubles of black women in the language of the black oral tradition. The results are blues narratives that are simultaneously intense, almost gothic, psychological dramas.

Both the use of the oral tradition and the impulse to write developed out of Jones's childhood in Lexington, Kentucky. She has commented repeatedly that the speech of her characters is the speech she heard in the streets and homes of her community, which was segregated for virtually all the years...