The stories in this collection nearly all take place in & around the mountain hollows of West Virginia: a world of cock-fighting, coal-mining, deer-stalking, sex, depression, drinking & 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 & posthumous revivals of interest in writers such... John Williams. Get out your pickaxes”. (New Yorker).