The stories in this collection nearly all take place in and around the mountain hollows of West Virginia: a world of cock-fighting, coal-mining, deer-stalking, fox-hunting, truck-driving, prize-fighting, sex, depression, drinking and death. They are the work of an uncannily observant chronicler of his region, who brilliantly evokes a whole crowd of doomed and despairing brawlers, murderers, drunkards and demented husbands and wives - desperate people desperately alive.
Raw-boned and fiercely original, Trilobites & Other Stories is the summation of a writer whose career, though brief, burned with an incandescent flame.
Breece D'J Pancake was born in West Virginia in 1952. He attended Marshall University, taught English at Virginia military schools, and then entered the creative writing program at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where he died in 1979. During his lifetime, his short fiction was published primarily in The Atlantic.