SOURCE: Rainwater, Catherine. “Negotiating Cultural Boundaries.” Canadian Literature 149 (summer 1996): 170-73.

In the following excerpt, Rainwater discusses King's thematic concerns in One Good Story, That One.

A unifying strain of Coyote laughter binds the ten stories contained in King's new collection [One Good Story, That One]. As in King's latest novel, Green Grass, Running Water, sometimes Coyote's victim in these vignettes is a character or a group of characters, sometimes the careless reader, and sometimes Coyote himself. The opening piece, “One Good Story, That One,” puts the wary reader on alert for Coyote's antics. The narrator and his cohorts tell a recycled, Native version of the Adam and Eve creation story to gullible “whitemen,” fully equipped with high-tech gadgetry for cultural appropriation (cameras and tape recorders), but unable to see “all the coyote tracks on the floor.” With their totalizing vision of the cultural Other and their apparent sense...