Pancake was totally obsessed with bringing alive the voices of his impoverished West Virginia. Born in the "hollers" of Appalachia, he acquired the crust of a wisecracking hillbilly but underneath he was collapsible: the torment of his life comes up like iron spikes through the twelve stories that his former University of Virginia teachers, James Alan McPherson and John Casey, have collected in this slim volume [The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake]. The reader feels somehow impaled on his prose: frequently a single paragraph (which he rewrote dozens of times) will stand as a kind of parable, spoken in the rough and bewildered voice of the common man. His stories, like his life, are shrouded in mystery. His teachers talk of him as though he shadowed them still; his presence was unerasable in their lives and yet they knew so little about him that neither knows why he...