This is writing where words are carefully and cleverly put together: some stories are whimsical; some disturbing; some verge on the sublime, others the ridiculous. 
In Barris’s hands a domestic argument over a hot tray becomes a desperate and somewhat cynical scenario of almost monumental pro- portions. A man and his dog are not just a man and his dog – as the dark finale unsettlingly reveals in the titular story, The Life of Worm. 
One of the stories I liked the most was To See the Mountain, in which Barris describes a writer’s workshop in a village. One can almost feel the dust, smell the meat cooking on the coals, almost sense the slightly damp, musty odour of an old hotel room; just about envision the wares piled up on street hawkers’ stands on those red-earth roads... Barris melds fact and fiction in Poor William, set in 2010 when a scourge of baboons invaded homes in parts of Cape Town. 

There is humour and pathos in every story and each one stands on its own as a wonderful tale. As a collection it’s a volume to be treasured and dipped into again and again.