SOURCE: Lightfoot, Judy. “Fiction about Slavery Finds Humanity amid the Injustice.” Seattle Times (25 March 2001): E12.

In the following review, Lightfoot praises the short stories in The Soulcatcher and Other Stories, noting that although the collection accurately portrays historical events, Johnson's prose “transcends indignation and blame.”

How can a writer of realistic fiction, intent on dramatizing the ordinary experiences of plausible persons, succeed when his characters are living a bizarre nightmare? In Soulcatcher, as in his novel The Middle Passage, Seattle author Charles Johnson takes up the challenge of writing realistic stories about persons caught up in the most surreal institution in American history.

Soulcatcher is a newly published collection of the historical short fictions that Johnson (who won the National Book Award for his novel Middle Passage) originally wrote for inclusion in Africans in America: America's Journey through Slavery, a companion book to the PBS series co-authored by...