A remarkable fact about these stories is that in their subjects, themes, tone, form, and technique, they do not easily lend themselves to generalizations. Speaking of stories by other writers, Miss Welty says that a reader should regard each one as an entity, a “little world in space, just as we can isolate one star in the sky by a concentrated vision.” Readers of her own stories will differ about which stars are of greater and which of lesser magnitude, but they are bound to find the range wide, from a vigorous levity to the terror of hallucination or the sweet pain of the heart’s secrets. Each reader will find some constellations of his own. He may notice, for one thing, that though the stories as a whole include various sorts of comedy, tragedy, satire, and fantasy, most characteristically these elements are blended within individual stories. No reader, one hopes, will allow his pleasure in the delicious comedy of “Lily Daw and the Three Ladies” and “Why I Live at the P.O.” to be diminished by somber reflections on feeble-mindedness and paranoia. But “Petrified Man,” though grotesquely funny in its scenes, characterizations, and dialogue, is actually a caustic satire on woman’s inhumanity to man and the vulgarity and perversity of a certain kind of city life. “Moon Lake,” “The Hitch-Hikers,” “The Wide Net,” “The Worn Path,” “Powerhouse” have their elements of pathos, and threaten, at various stages, to turn into tragedy. Yet the interplay of light and shadow is continuous; the weather shifts; the tone modulates, slowly or swiftly; and nothing is exactly as we expected it to be, except that in our bones we feel that it is very much like life—full of the fluctuations we are born to in an odd, painful, and exciting universe, in which dreams are always colliding with reality or embroidering it; the grotesque lies close to the lovely; and comedy always borders on tragedy or pathos. Powerhouse instinctively knows this when he picks something awful out of the air (“I got a telegram my wife is dead”), teases and plays with it (“Truth is something worse, I ain’t said what yet. It’s something hasn’t come to me, but I ain’t saying it won’t. And when it does, then want me to tell you?”), masters it, puts it in the world, in his fantastic art. And so does his creator.