SOURCE: Kendall, Elaine. “Two Lands Linked by a Mystical Quality.” Los Angeles Times (27 June 1995): E4.

In the following review, Kendall praises Bass's sense of regional place in the stories of In the Loyal Mountains.

Impelled by a profound love of the land, the 10 stories in In the Loyal Mountains are a reminder that American literature draws its unique strength from a powerful sense of place. Here, author Rick Bass concentrates on two distinct and contrasting regions, the Delta country of Mississippi and a remote valley in Montana, areas linked only by a mystical quality common to both.

In “The History of Rodney,” the narrator and his wife have rented a ramshackle house in a ghost town where they are the only white inhabitants. Rodney was a thriving river port until the Mississippi flooded and shifted its course, leaving cotton barges stuck on a sea of mud and the...