One of the many conversations that make me want to kill myself is the one that begins with the dumb question, "What science fiction or fantasy should I give to people who don't like reading science fiction and fantasy?" Its dark mirror, "What sort of literary fiction should I give to someone who only reads science fiction?" leads to nothing better. Invariably, a single strategy is developed--the lightest and most literary (by pedigree, not form or fashion) SF for the former, the literary fiction with fanboy pretensions for the latter. So we trade Galatea 2.2 or The Night Country for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay or The Ice Storm. Oh thankgodthankgod at least the first two novels have complex sentences and suburban angst. One is even about a writer exploring his own personality and identity, just like everything else we've ever read. Our literary fans are safe. As easily appeased are the SF readers, thanks to great dollops of comic book goodness in the Chabon and Moody titles. Horizons have been extended, but only so far. No extra thinking required, and we can all spend an evening patting ourselves on the back for dipping our toe into the merely familiar instead of performing our usual cannonballs into the pools of the intimate.

This is like going on vacation by camping out in your neighbor's backyard. Look, Marge, we can see our house from here!

As I'm writing this in Fortean Bureau and not, say, Small Spiral Notebook, I'll suggest an alternative strategy to the second question. What interests me as a reader of science fiction, fantasy, and horror are the simultaneous sense of place and dislocation, and the related theme of estrangement that emerges from stories where you're in a place you don't know, but which is nonetheless real in the narrative. Of course, alienation is hardly the only theme in the speculative genres; there is, for example, the tale of the lone übermensch showing up all doubters and destroying all enemies with the double-barreled shotgun of Enlightenment rationalism and dumb-ass never-kissed-a-girl naiveté. As fans of that theme are unlikely to be interested in reading literary fiction anyway, and since they're generally far too fucking boring and supercilious at once for me to spend more than a few seconds with before daydreaming of a box cutter for my own throat, we'll stick with the theme of estrangement-in-place. I think people who like to read science fiction/fantasy/horror exclusively should be introduced to literary fiction by matching themes, not random objets d'plot like ghosts and AI.

Enter Breece D'J Pancake. This improbably named author (in fact, D'J is an Atlantic Monthly typo that he adopted for kicks) wrote and published several stories while still a student at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, then committed suicide in 1979 at the age of 26. The boy had problems. Could write like a dream, though.

His stories all take place in a West Virginian Appalachia that was already being chewed to pieces while he was growing up there. In "Trilobites," the first tale in his posthumously published The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake (Back Bay Books, $13.95), young Colly is wedded to a home that is being strip-mined to death. He can't bear to sell out his home and patch of land, but wants to rush off with a newly sophisticated girlfriend who had "escaped" years ago to Florida for the big-time of college. As problems go, it's not a big deal, and Pancake knows this, and thus balances the narrative against an overwhelming sense of time, thanks to the fossils unearthed by grinding up mountains for copper and coal. Colly, like Pancake, like all of us, is just a speck of flesh and time in an uncaring universe. Here today, trapped under fourteen million tons of stone and soil tomorrow.

Depressing, yes, but Pancake knew more than one note. For heroics, read "The Scrapper," in which Skeevy, a former boxer, gets roped into staging a human cockfight. But the fix is in, as the bellman, the ref, and the other fighter are all just out to murder someone:

Skeevy danced with the flagging pain. He went again with a combination to the temple. He wanted to tear the eye out and step on it, to feel its pressure building under his foot ... pop.

As he went down he could hear Trudy screaming his name above the cheers. He lay for a time on the cold floor of the Sunflower Inn: the jukebox played, and he heard Bund coughing.

He rolled to his side.

Cephus threw water on Skeevy, and he spat out the bitten-off tip of his tongue. Gibson waited as Skeevy raised himself to a squat. His head cleared, and he knew he could get up.

Take that, tough guy. Story ends there. Sensawunda described and disguised as a rabbit punch.

Pancake built worlds out of throwaway words in simple sentences. Yes, his stories take place on boring ol' mundane Earth, but it's not likely an Earth you have experienced. Pancake, the West Virginian poor boy turned collegiate intellectual turned suicidal Catholic, felt out of place in his own skin and projected that psychology onto the landscape.

His telling details tell nearly the whole story—a song on an ancient radio is Chicago, but it may as well be a freshly Free Mars to the narrator of "The Salvation of Me." There's magic in accidents in "The Way it Has To Be." Alena says she got herself a job, but Momma knows better: "Top shelf in the cupboard fell down and made a awful mess. I been worried it's a token." It was. And everywhere, there are cars. Broken cars, slapped-together cars, cars roaring out of town, or crawling behind the lead of a serial killer in the snowplow. Cars are to Pancake like phallic rockets were to Golden Age SF. Everything that is good and noble and self-actualizing to an overgrown adolescent is Out There, and all we need is something shiny enough and fast enough to get us there. The honorable, the marginal, the alternative history where the IWW's One Big Union survived the machine-gun fire of the bosses, the silent testimony of the Mound Builders, Pancake's West Virginia is limned with a sense of the Old Weird.

Pancake never flinched from the complexity of setting and telling beloved of SF fans. It's easy enough to write off all of West Virginia as the home of backwards hillbillies, and we meet one or two in his stories. But these backwards hillbillies are real human beings. In "Fox Hunters," fatherless Cuffy gets rough yet avuncular guidance from Enoch, who lost his virginity at age eight to a whore thanks to his own father:

"…ol' gal said I couldn't come in - so he left me in the car an' went back with a tire tool - then he come an' got me an' showed me that ol' gal and her man conked out on the floor. [… ] He taked me t' this room an' busted in on this gal an' made her lay real still till I's finished. Then she called Daddy a SOB cause all he give her was fifty cents, an' he knocked her teeth out."

The linchpin of that whole dialogue isn't the shocking violence or the absurd and abusive sex; it's "SOB." Not "son of a bitch," but "SOB." Is that what the whore said, or is that all that Enoch can bring himself to say, as it's not polite to cuss, even while telling such a story to another man? And yet, at the same time, the story isn't about something so banal as "Horrible childhoods don't necessarily make horrible adults" or "Southerners are polite, not like you" at all. It's a story worth rereading time and again, like all of his too few works. Pancake's worlds weren't just weird; they were deep.

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