At his best Pancake is an artful narrator, often indirect in his approach, slow to reveal the situation underlying the speech and behavior of his characters. Several of the pieces [in The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake] require two or more readings before their implications can be fully grasped. But what is apparent on every page is Pancake's ability to recreate, in sharp and memorable detail, the West Virginia landscape of ancient, weathered hills and hollows, of half-abandoned mining villages, rusting trailers, tank cars, sad cafés, and impoverished farms—a landscape that serves as a metaphorical equivalent for the lives of his characters, most of them trapped, crippled, or obsolete. The appeal to the senses is constant.

In the first (and, I think, most successful) of the stories, "Trilobites," the narrator is a struggling young farmer, Colly, with a strong love of the land which is frustrated...