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, sex, depression, drinking and death. "It would be easy to allow his one collection of stories to be buried under the landslide of books published every year. But it's worth doing a little excavating to dig it up. The past few years have seen late-in-the-day and posthumous revivals of interest in writers such...John Williams. Get out your pickaxes". (New Yorker).