[In the following review, Seaman comments that the stories in The Hermit's Story are among the best Bass has written.]

Bass, a passionate, versatile, and increasingly lauded author acutely attuned to the wild and our conflicted relationship with nature, is especially gifted as a short story writer. His newest collection [The Hermit's Story,] is his most pristine, tender, and transporting yet. Bass uses simple, solid language, building sentences that preserve breathing space around each word like a stacked stonewall reveals the contours of each stone. Beautiful in their magical imagery, dramatic in their situations, and exquisitely poignant in their insights, these stories of awe and loss are quite astonishing in their mythic use of place and the elements of earth, air, fire, and water. In “Swans,” a woman lights fires along the shore of a freezing pond to warm the five swans living there, while the once robust fire in her aging mate's mind slowly turns to ash. In the title story, a woman, a man, and a half-dozen hunting dogs lost in a blizzard find miraculous shelter beneath what they feared was the frozen surface of a deep lake. Bass evinces a fascination with vision and its diminishment and how the world is transformed when sight is regained. He portrays a man suffering from a detached retina, a fireman who experiences a strange form of tunnel vision while surrounded by flames, and a crazy pair of lovers who descend naked into an abandoned mine, exchanging the incandescence of the sun for utter darkness. Marriage, too, begins in radiance but is often driven into the dark underworld as love flickers and fails. Bass' characters endure near-entombments and other in-the-dark rites of passage, struggling toward the light, toward the recognition that they must love each other, the earth, and all its creatures.