SOURCE: Reynolds, Susan Salter. “Discoveries.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (7 July 2002): R-15.

In the following review, Reynolds investigates the role of shame in Pancake's short stories.

Some writing comes from the ego, some from the id. Breece Pancake is one of those writers who burst on the world with great promise, publishing his story “Trilobites” in The Atlantic in 1977, but left in great sorrow, shooting himself. His brief oeuvre is all id: rough and random and sometimes irrational. It is often hard to tell whom the main character in these stories is talking to, his dogs or his woman (both are called “her” or “she”).

One story begins from the point of view of a possum, scurrying to get her babies across the road. The characters are “crackers,” low-class whites in West Virginia. Some of their values—tolerant of sex with minors, or jokes about sex with minors...