SOURCE: "California Screaming," in The New York Times Book Review, August 13, 1989, pp. 6-7.

In the following mixed review of The Rainbow Stories, James compares Vollmann's literary technique and ambitions to those of Tom Wolfe and Thomas Pynchon, arguing that the stories in this collection belong somewhere in between the former's reportorial style and the latter's "fabulism."

Halfway between Tom Wolfe's journalism and Thomas Pynchon's fabulism, William T. Vollmann's Rainbow Stories search for a new form. In stories that blend colorful documentary evidence with a novelist's dark imagination, Mr. Vollmann offers images no ordinary reporter could glimpse, no typical novelist invent: a 16-year-old skinhead called Bootwoman Marisa bites her lip while a dragon is tattooed on her thigh; a bag lady carries around black plastic sacks filled with her most prized possessions, dead pigeons; a murderer called The Zombie preys on homeless people, feeding them crystal-blue Drano before he...