SOURCE: Willis, Meredith Sue. “Stories With a Sense of Place.” Washington Post Book World (26 March 1989): 11.

In the following review, Willis compares The Watch with two other short story collections, all depicting a strong sense of regional place, and discusses the symbolic significance of animals in Bass's stories.

Will Weaver's short story collection, A Gravestone Made of Wheat, is dominated by landscape and the relationships between men. Weaver is a crafter of sentences and paragraphs, and his loving, familiar, crucial descriptions of machines are beautiful—sometimes more vivid than his characters. In “Going Home,” he writes, “I began to think about the engine, about how the spark plugs and cylinders and camshaft and transmission and running gear all worked together; about how one small thing—a loose wire, a short, an oil seal—could break that whole rhythm that propelled us up these mountains, I began to hear engine...