As with his earlier novels A Piece of My Heart (1976) and The Ultimate Good Luck (1981), the stories from Ford's debut collection are notable for both their lack of sentimentality and undercurrent of menace.

[1] In retrospect, Rock Springs has become known as one of Ford's “Montana books,” along with Wildlife (1990), and Canada (2012), since the setting for most of the stories occurs in that state.

The stories of Rock Springs are extremely concentrated, so a reader who pays attention not only wants to turn pages but to prolong them, experience the supple, ironic, expanding and contracting medium Mr. Ford compounds from everyday speech.

What distinguishes his stories from those of many contemporaries who share conventions of style and subject matter is just this personal, vital, idiomatic presence that both mirrors and critiques our habits of language.”[4]A decade later, The Paris Review —profiling Ford for its iconic interview series— acknowledged that: “His single volume of stories has established him as a master of the genre.”[5]

In her 2012 New Yorker piece profiling Ford and his recently published novel Canada, Lorrie Moore recognized the continued influence of Ford's first story collection some 25 years after it was published:”Ford has long made dissection of a certain unsavoriness part of his skill as a writer—he can parse spoiled masculinity like the finest of feminists—most famously in the widely anthologized short stories “Rock Springs” and “Communist.” A boy’s experience of adult carelessness has often been his subject.”[6]In an interview from 2015, Nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro was asked “What books do you find yourself returning to again and again?” To which Ishiguro responded: “I tend not to reread whole books over and over, even my big favorites.