While William Hoffman has set his fiction almost exclusively in the mountainous coalfields of Virginia and the Tidewater region surrounding the Chesapeake Bay, "his themes," as Jeanne Nostrandt wrote in her essay on William Hoffman for Contemporary Fiction Writers of the South (1993), "delve into the complexities of the human condition and the plight of the human spirit in any place and at any time." Although some reviewers have called Hoffman a regional writer, focusing on his concern for the Southern values of family, community, and religious faith, they fail to see that the so-called regional aspects of his stories are equally applicable to the human condition everywhere, much like the regional stories of William Faulkner have long been considered descriptive of humanity across the globe. Hoffman's stories in particular deal with the age-old questions of faith and disbelief, doubt and certainty, relationships, commitment, love and hate, and the...