With so much new fiction appearing in print and online, not to mention the accompanying clamour for attention in publicity and reviews, it can be all too easy to miss out on books that, for whatever reason, have fallen out of favour, have never received the critical consideration they deserved, or have otherwise been neglected. Or maybe it’s simply that I haven’t been paying enough attention. In my defense, until recently I had never heard of, much less read, Katherine Anne Porter. I stumbled across the name while reading a piece about Sam Peckinpah, specifically an article about a little-seen TV movie he wrote and directed in the mid-60s, between Major Dundee and The Wild Bunch. He had already been fired from The Cincinnati Kid and was largely considered unhirable until producer Daniel Melnick got the opportunity to adapt a novella called Noon Wine for ABC Stage 67, a series of one-hour movies. Melnick was already a fan of Peckinpah’s early work and offered him the gig. Peckinpah, in turn, was familiar with the novella and its author, Katherine Anne Porter. His critically acclaimed (but sadly little-seen) adaptation is available on YouTube here.

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The short novel—Porter loathed the term novella—Noon Wine was originally published as the middle tale in a triptych of short novels in the 1937 collection Pale Horse, Pale Rider. The story focuses on Royal Earle Thompson, a small dairy farmer in Texas in the early years of the 20th century. When the reserved Swedish immigrant Olaf Helton turns up one day, Thompson hires him to work the farm. The largely uncommunicative man transforms it from near-ruin into modest prosperity through sheer hard work and determination. Helton is an odd, solitary figure—he plays the same harmonica tune obsessively, tolerates no interference, and barely speaks—but he works without complaint, and the farm begins to thrive.

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After nine years, a stranger named Homer T. Hatch comes to talk to Thompson, claiming that Helton escaped from a North Dakota asylum after killing his brother over a stolen harmonica. Thompson instinctively distrusts Hatch and, feeling protective of Helton, after a confused, ambiguous struggle in which he’s sure he sees Hatch stab Helton and almost rip him open, ends up killing Hatch with an axe. Thompson’s wife, Ellie, comes out of the house in time to see Helton fleeing the farm. Later, Helton is captured and dies shortly after, having been beaten by the posse. Thompson persuades his wife to back up his story that he killed Hatch in defense of Helton, even though she did not witness the struggle. She reluctantly agrees, despite her moral convictions, and is bitter at being coerced into lying. 

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At the trial, Thompson is acquitted of Hatch’s murder, but can’t escape his own conscience, Ellie’s coldness, or his neighbours' doubts. He obsessively tours the surrounding farms, telling his version of events to anyone who'll listen, trying to convince them—and himself—that he acted justly. His wife and sons grow estranged and frightened. Finally, after writing a note to explain why he killed Hatch, Thompson kills himself.

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What makes Noon Wine extraordinary is that Porter engineers a moral and perceptual crisis that can’t be untangled—and then shows what that does to a man over time. Thompson kills Hatch believing he saw him move to stab Helton, but Porter renders the moment with just enough uncertainty that neither the reader nor Thompson himself can confirm whether he saw what he thought he saw, or unconsciously constructed that perception to justify a darker impulse, perhaps something violent in himself he'd never previously acknowledged. The doubt isn't a puzzle to be solved; it's the point. Thompson himself can't solve it, and that's what destroys him.

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What follows is psychologically devastating in its accuracy. Thompson's tour of the neighbouring farms—retelling his story again and again, seeking ratification—reads less like a man defending his innocence than a man trying to talk himself into believing it. Each retelling is slightly different, slightly more rehearsed. Porter understood that innocent men don't generally need to convince themselves. The compulsive repetition is itself a form of confession.

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Thompson has a very particular idea of himself—a decent, fair man, not the kind of man who does what he did. The novella is about the collapse of that self-image. He can't integrate what happened into his sense of who he is, and suicide is the logical endpoint: there's no version of himself left to inhabit. All of this is delivered in prose that is plain, almost austere, and utterly controlled—close enough to Thompson's perspective to share his uncertainty, yet distant enough to observe it with devastating clarity.

 

In the two novellas that bookend Noon Wine, Porter, through her semi-autobiographical protagonist, Miranda Gay, gives us a study in contrasts. Old Mortality (1938) traces Miranda's childhood and young adulthood in a Southern family steeped in romantic mythology about the past, particularly the legend of the beautiful, doomed Aunt Amy. The story follows Miranda's gradual, painful disillusionment with inherited family narratives and her determination to find truth for herself. Its three-part structure, moving through time, gives Miranda's disenchantment an almost classical shape; the portrait of Southern mythology — the cult of the dead Amy, the family's collective fiction-making — is rendered with a cool, almost lethal irony that never tips into caricature.

 

Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939) is rawer and more personal (Porter herself nearly died in the 1918 influenza pandemic), and that autobiographical pressure gives it an hallucinatory intensity. It’s set toward the end of the First World War and follows the adult Miranda as a newspaper reviewer in Denver, Colorado, where she falls in love with Adam, a young soldier awaiting deployment to the conflict in Europe. As the pandemic strikes, the narrative charts her near-death experience with influenza and her grief-stricken emergence into a world stripped of illusion, Adam having died while she lay delirious.

 

The fever sequences in Pale Horse, Pale Rider are remarkable for the way Porter dissolves the boundary between delirium and vision without ever losing formal control. Miranda's illness is rendered not as mere hallucination but as a kind of compressed metaphysical experience—she moves through landscapes of death that feel close to supernatural, neither straightforwardly symbolic nor objectively realistic. Porter draws on the novella's title imagery (from the Book of Revelation and from the spiritual about a lover being taken away that Miranda quotes to Adam—itself foreshadowing Adam’s death) to give the fever dream an apocalyptic register that feels earned rather than imposed. What’s striking is the ambivalence at the heart of the sequences: Miranda, in her delirium, reaches a place of extraordinary peace, a luminous stillness that death seems to offer, and her return to life is experienced not as rescue but as a kind of bereavement—she is pulled back into a world of noise and loss and the war's grinding ugliness. The fever thus becomes the emotional and thematic crux of the whole novella: it is where Porter makes her most radical claim, that survival itself can be a form of deprivation. It’s a tale of intense sorrow and trauma—and its elegiac ending, with Miranda surviving into a world of absence and devastation, carries a weight that lingers long after.

 

I read these three in the Penguin Modern Classics edition of Porter’s Selected Short Stories, which contains The Old Order, another long story made up of vignettes about Miranda’s extended family that, taken together, shed more light on the history with which the adult in the previous novellas has become disillusioned. Although written after Old Mortality and Pale Horse, Pale Rider, the story lacks their focus and intensity. ‘The Jilting of Granny Weatherall’ offers another instance of Porter’s skill with stream-of-consciousness prose, as she renders her protagonist’s fearful, bitter perceptions and emotions as she lies on her deathbed. ‘The Cracked Looking-Glass’ gives us a young Irish woman, Rosaleen, married to the older, previously married Dennis, and focuses on the consolations of the imagination. In essence, Rosaleen mythologizes her own life, spinning romantic fictions to paper over her loneliness and disappointment.

 

One of the most enigmatic stories in the collection is ‘Holiday,’ whose opening line: “At that time I was too young for some of the troubles I was having and I had not yet learned what to do with them,” precisely encapsulates the distinction between the rawness of inexperience and the absence of acquired coping, setting up the ambiguity at the heart of the narrative. The narrator looks back with a clarity she didn't possess at the time, and that gap between the experiencing self and the narrating self is established in this beautifully calibrated sentence. The story follows a young woman who retreats to a German immigrant farming family in rural Texas to recover from the unspecified ‘troubles’ that are never revealed. The Müller family is wholly absorbed in the physical rhythms of farm labour, and the narrator observes them with the detached curiosity of an outsider. The story's centre of gravity, however, is Ottilie—a severely disabled woman who serves the family as a drudge, hauling and cleaning, apparently barely human in their eyes, yet gradually revealed to have her own inner life. When the matriarch dies, Ottilie is left behind during the funeral procession, and the narrator impulsively takes her for a wild cart ride—a strange, ambiguous moment of liberation. The Müller family sequences have a richly observed documentary quality, but the story's power lies in what Porter leaves unresolved: the relationship between the narrator's private grief and Ottilie's visible suffering is implied rather than stated, and the cart ride resists any settled interpretation.

 

Of the remaining stories, ‘Flowering Judas’ and ‘María Concepcíon’—both set in Mexico—stand out. Both stories deal with betrayal and a kind of cold female endurance. The latter through the primal register of a Mexican peasant woman who kills her rival and reclaims her husband with the impassive fatalism of the earth itself, while ‘Flowering Judas’ has the more intellectually tortured figure of Laura, a would-be American revolutionary in Mexico caught in stasis between ideology and emotion, complicit in a betrayal she can’t quite name. 

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Porter’s fiction rewards patience and attention—she doesn't announce her effects, and the full weight of what she has done often hits home some time after you've finished reading. That habit of resonating long after the page is turned may be why she has never quite achieved the popular readership her work deserves. But for readers willing to slow down and meet her on her own terms, this Penguin Modern Classics selection is as good a starting point as any—and Noon Wine, in particular, is the kind of story that leaves a mark you can’t easily account for, and makes you wonder what else you’ve been missing. 

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Mike O’Driscoll, June 2026.