Breece D’J Pancake’s short story “Trilobites” was one of the first the Dish highlighted for our Saturday feature. Jon Michaud declares that it’s “high time for a Pancake revival,” praising the writer’s depictions of hard-scrabble life in West Virginia in The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake:
While deeply tied to the details of its Appalachian setting, the book offers a broader portrait of the personal and societal wreckage left behind by mass industrialization. Grim, work-related deaths and ailments abound in Pancake’s fiction: lungs bleed from coal dust; mine gas turns a man “blue as jeans”; another is killed by fragments of metal lodged in his brain. When I heard the news, last month, of the chemical spill that left three hundred thousand West Virginians without usable water for a week, I thought immediately of this sentence from “The Scrapper”: “He could see where the wives had planted flowers, but the plants were all dead or dying from the constant shower of coal dust.” Nearly all of Pancake’s stories share a unity of time, taking place in a matter of hours or days, but they are set against an ever-present awareness of geological time, of the epochs and eras that preceded the present moment. His fictions combine the intimacy and specificity of a Vermeer portrait with the grandeur and fierceness of a Bierstadt panoramic.
These bleak qualities may make Pancake’s stories timely, but it is their compressed artistry and distilled feeling that make them timeless. I read the book with no foreknowledge of Pancake’s work or life—always a welcome experience. On my first pass through, I was reminded of an astonishing variety of other writers. Thematically and structurally, the book owed a lot to “Dubliners” and “Winesburg, Ohio,” but, stylistically, Pancake was fully formed, an uncanny hybrid of dirty realism and Southern gothic. A whole world I didn’t know about was opened up for me. After finishing the book, I would have happily gone spelunking in the library basement for more of Pancake’s work, but there was none. This is Pancake’s only book, originally published in 1979, three years after his death, at the age of twenty-seven, from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Like the pedestalled feet of a ruined statue, these twelve stories can only hint at the body of work that might have been produced had he lived.
The Dish 