The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake

At 26, West Virginia writer Breece D'J Pancake took his own life with a shotgun, leaving behind a small collection of carefully constructed short stories. As a whole, they tend to involve sad men struggling against alienation and the changing American South. Take "Trilobites," his first published short story. A young man named Colly must contend with the imminent buyout of his family farm after his father's death. When Ginny, the one who got away—and who got away all the way to college—returns, Colly finds himself between the rough-and-tumble provincial world in which he hunts turtle for soup and the world where Ginny has become a sleek, carefree young woman. Colly is as tied to the land his father worked as he is aware that the family cannot keep the farm, and as he searches for trilobites, he searches for some sign of permanence. Throughout, Pancake's details skillfully render the tension springing up in Colly, the heat of the South, and the forlorn state of affairs in a small town where the closest thing to entertainment is ogling a girl probably too young to be ogled or walking through abandoned buildings at night. Like many Pancake stories, it evokes the claustrophobic sense of feeling trapped by fate. These stories certainly aren't uplifting, but they are revelations of the power of narrative to evoke pain.