SOURCE: Saari, Jon. Review of The Watch, by Rick Bass. Antioch Review 47, no. 4 (fall 1989): 499-500.

In the following review, Saari praises the stories in The Watch, depicting them as mesmerizing.

These ten stories [in The Watch] introduce a writer of originality who possesses a sense of the bizarre in everyday life. In three of the stories an unnamed narrator recounts his experiences with his best friend, Kirby. Kirby has inherited hundreds of small oil wells from his father, which he is selling off one by one and using the money to live a wayward life of trips to Mexico full of drink and aimless celebration. Kirby has a large bass named Shack living in his swimming pool in the deep end where Kirby has submerged a Volkswagen bug. Neighborhood children try to catch Shack, who takes on symbolic import for the narrator. In another story, “Juggernaut,” the narrator...