Breece D'J Pancake is known for a small body of short fiction set largely in rural West Virginia, where declining work, damaged land and limited economic choices shape the lives of farmers, labourers and young people deciding whether to leave. Stories such as 'Trilobites', 'The Scrapper' and 'In the Dry' use mines, farms, bars, machinery and hunting as concrete parts of the characters' worlds rather than symbolic scenery. His sentences are compressed and image-heavy, and the stories often end without resolving the pressures that have accumulated around their characters. The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake is the central collection and effectively the complete entry point to his fiction. His work fits Appalachian literature, American short stories and working-class rural fiction, with readers of Raymond Carver and Denis Johnson likely to recognise the spare surface even though Pancake's landscapes are more specifically Appalachian. Read more Less
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