SOURCE: Montrose, David. “In a Melancholy State.” Times Literary Supplement (23 October 1992): 21.

In the following mixed review, Montrose deems Trilobites and Other Stories “an intimately frustrating memorial, testifying to potential rather than achievement.”

On April 8, 1979, at Charlottesville, Virginia, Breece D'J Pancake blew out his brains with a shotgun. He was twenty-six. In 1983, thanks to the efforts of Pancake's widowed mother and admiring literary figures, his fictional oeuvre—this collection of stories—was published in America and earned a coterie following; now, thanks to a long-standing devotee at Secker, it has reached Britain.

These facts prompt memories of John Kennedy Toole, who, in 1969, killed himself following repeated rejections of his masterly novel, A Confederacy of Dunces (which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1981). Pancake's circumstances, though, were different: he had held a creative writing fellowship, had established contacts, been accepted by Atlantic Monthly. From the volume's foreword by James Alan McPherson...