[The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake displays fiction] that offers the deep pleasure of art created out of the need to transform suffering…. These twelve stories are all we will ever have from [Pancake], but they may well be read for generations to come.

While [Bobbie Ann Mason's characters in her initial volume, Shiloh and Other Stories,] are sociological types, Pancake's are individuals who act out of the kinds of necessity present in our own lives. We are not tourists in his fiction, but residents. Pancake's characters, like Mason's, belong to rural America. Mason's territory, though, is a gentle Kentucky, overrun by K-Marts and Datsun dealerships; Pancake's is West Virginia—hard, rocky and infertile, carved out of land five other states didn't want. From this damp and chilly landscape, from failing farms and young men who leave them to work as miners or truckdrivers or gas-station attendants, Pancake...