SOURCE: A review of One Good Story, That One, in World Literature Today, Vol. 69, No. 1, Winter, 1995, p. 201.

In the following review of One Good Story, That One, Gorjup lauds King's ability to blend elements of Native and Western storytelling techniques.

Thomas King is undoubtedly one of Canada's most respected native writers. His fiction—at a time when fiction is often used by militant authors for overt political reasons—is humorous, magical, and unpretentious, refusing to take itself seriously yet always mindful of the reader's intelligence. The voice of his typical narrator is sly, multilayered, and deliberately vague, reflecting the complexity of the subject at hand, which inevitably deals with the tension that arises from civilizational clashes between Natives and Europeans. The narrator, like the story he tells, is "unreliable": he continually reinvents the world and himself. He assumes the characteristics of the coyote, a popular trickster spirit of...