Once the thrill subsided, it became clear to Larry that first publication was just that: first. More than a year of unremitting rejections followed. If he ever feared that his single publication might’ve been an aberration, a fluke, he wasn’t alone. Barry Hannah, the South’s analog to Samuel Beckett, had recently arrived in Oxford as the university’s writer-in-residence. Larry pressed enough stories on him—“Brown’s early badness,” Barry called them—that Barry took to ducking out the back of the bar, as he’d later write, “when I saw [Larry] coming down the walk with the inevitable manila envelope.” When “Plant Growin’ Problems” appeared, “I cheered but secretly believed he’d peaked out.” (Barry confessed these doubts, I should note, for the sole purpose of eating them, crow-style, years later. “Passion begat brilliance” is how he summarized Larry’s career.)

It’s this period of Larry’s apprenticeship I find most interesting, because at some point therein Larry moved the goalposts for himself. The ambition was no longer to earn extra money, or to merely see his work in print; the ambition, as great as it gets, was to make Art. You see glints of this in the next two stories—far more dazzlingly in the latter—that he published: “Nightmare,” which the horror writer and editor T. E. D. Klein ran in Twilight Zone magazine in 1985, and “Boy and Dog,” which appeared in Fiction International a few months earlier (and later took a slot in Facing the Music, Larry’s debut collection). “Nightmare” is a brief, bilious fever dream chronicling a man’s passage into the afterlife, with a wretched caucus of ghosts attending to his destiny. It’s a horror story, down to its (exposed) bones, but note the way Larry heaped adjectives and gerunds at the front of his sentences, as if to sustain a funereal drumbeat through the story. He was playing with language now, using it less as a tool than an instrument. In “Boy and Dog” he took a much further leap, close to quantum. On one level it’s a formalist exercise, a late-night self-dare: 293 five-word sentences, stacked as evenly as coins. Yet the story it relates—a Butterfly Effect–maelstrom resulting from a car running over a dog—is wrenching and complex, with deadpan humor woven into deadpan tragedy, the constraints of the story’s form somehow magnifying its unsettling effects. With his depiction of firefighters (ineptly) battling a car fire, moreover, Larry was now drawing from firsthand experience and observation, grounding his fiction in his native soil. He was applying what he’d learned to what he’d already known.

A stray line from “Nightmare,” in retrospect, begs for repurposing: “And finally he found his voice, found that indeed he did have a voice.” Passion had started begetting brilliance.