Jayne Ann Phillips' volume of short stories, Black Tickets … comes garlanded with quotes about its author's "early genius" and its "crooked beauty."… Perhaps if I had not been expecting so much I would not have felt so grievously let down by this reputed éminence jeune. With one or two exceptions, I find these stories to be artsy, derivative and unconvincing. There are many portraits of those who walk on the wild side—strippers, hookers, pimps, nymphomaniacs, drug-dealers, and the generally crazy. Phillips recounts their stories with a studied, infinitely irritating mixture of street language and blowzy writing-class prose….

Sometimes she sounds like Gertrude Stein: "It was spring it was raining it was the ambulance almost pretty in the dark." ("Snow") Another story begins like a parody of any one of a number of Southern Gothic writers: "In 1934 I was seven years old. Bellington, Virginia, was a Depression town...