From all accounts, Breece Pancake was severely locked into both categories of the dreamer and the resigned. Much of the tension in [The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake] seems to come from his desire to leave his home territory and his surrender to the overwhelming pull of the land, the people, and the expectations that are passed down through families. This tension imbued him with an unflinching and painful awareness of where he came from that, I think, makes these stories exceptional.

Many of the inhabitants in this collection have a bond with the land that goes much deeper than the topsoil that provides them with their livings. They consider the very fossils in the rocks a part of their own history. Every worn wooden shack in every hollow seems to have a glass case full of arrowheads, fossils and rocks. In "Trilobites," a young man troubled by...