["The Velvet Horn"] has a ranging profundity and rich life found in current American fiction only in a Southern setting. Only the South offers a people bound to living history through crossed lines of blood and name, through the land that bred them, the falling forests and the barrening cotton and cattle fields of the drought years. Against this setting Lytle's powerful sense of a folk creates in a reader a sadness, a poignancy for that richer time and place: the upper South following the Civil War. (p. 13)

In the hands of a lesser writer some of the turgid passion of the narrative would be melodramatic. Lytle's deep insight has justified the tragic truth beneath each violent act. The old feud that Lucius feels in his bastard blood … is more than family enmity; it is the untamed hunter's being driven by the very land to live within fenced...