The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake (1983)

by Breece D'J Pancake

Bleak, affective stories of a culture fallen to rust. Thick with hill vernacular and difficult to follow at times, the Stories of Breece D’J Pancake share potent themes of poverty and escapist aspiration, violence as a bullet or a fist or a crumpled car, ostracism and discontent.

As products of the reality they were wrought from, Pancake’s stories heavily feature the automobile as a symbol of agency. It is a token of masculinity and the primary manifestation of the ambitions of the protagonist. Many stories follow a teenage apprentice mechanic, building his character hour by hour and assembling an identity out of scraps from the junkyard. The pupil of a shop owner who is a stern man or a cruel man or a cautiously benevolent man, an adult with the power to shape boys into men like him.

“Fox Hunters” tells of such a young man, Bo, not yet rotten, and the disdain the older men of the town feel for him in seeing their sordid selves reflected back. When a schoolgirl dies in a road wreck, Bo lets on that he knows the men had paid her for sex. Fearful and self-preserving, they decide it’d be easier to earn his silence with booze and camaraderie than to bury his body.

But the men had whittled the time away telling lies mingled with truth until Bo could no longer distinguish between the two. He had told things, too; no truth or lie could go untold. It was fixed now; the truth and lies were all told. (“Fox Hunters”)

A darkness haunts the hollows of Pancake’s West Virginia. There’s a blight left by the closure of the mines, foreign wars, deindustrialization. His stories convey the same message about Appalachia as JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy but via depiction, not description.

I’m going to come back to W.Va. when this is over. There’s something ancient and deeply rooted in my soul. I like to think that I’ve left my ghost up one of those hollows, and I’ll never be able to leave for good until I find it. (Letter to Parents, 1974)

This collection serves a poignant reminder of tragedy: from the personal to the familial to the regional and perhaps most of all to the universal, the tragedy of losing so young a writer who really got it.