Criticism > Short Story Criticism > Bradfield, Scott - Anthony Gardner (review date March 1989)

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Anthony Gardner (review date March 1989)

SOURCE: Gardner, Anthony. Review of The Secret Life of Houses, by Scott Bradfield. Encounter 72 (March 1989): 54.

[In the following excerpt, Gardner praises The Secret Life of Houses, commenting that the stories combine a dark sense of humor with a taste for fantasy, without trivializing the serious elements of each tale.]

This collection [The Secret Life of Houses] combines a wonderfully inventive, dark sense of humour with a strong taste for fantasy, and yet manages never to belittle the serious issues in question.

Bradfield prefaces his first tale with a quotation from Nietzsche—“Without the dream one would have found no occasion for a division of the world”—and the tension between the material life and the life of the imagination is his constant theme, though one that each of the nine stories deals with in quite a different way. In “The Dream of the...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Judy Cooke (review date 22 September 1988)
   2. Roz Kaveney (review date 14 October 1988)
   3. Robert Sandall (review date 11 December 1988)
   4. Anthony Gardner (review date March 1989)
   5. Mark R. Kelly (review date September 1989)
   6. Kirkus Reviews (review date 15 September 1990)
   7. Sybil Steinberg (review date 28 September 1990)
   8. Donna Seaman (review date 1 November 1990)
   9. Dorothy Golden (review date 1 November 1990)
   10. Carolyn See (review date 19 November 1990)
   11. Michael Upchurch (review date 13 January 1991)
   12. Paul West (review date 24 February 1991)
   13. Elizabeth Young (review date 29 January 1993)
   14. Robert Irwin (review date 12 February 1993)
   15. Kathy O'Shaughnessy (review date 6 April 1993)
   16. Eva Salzman (review date 15 May 1993)
   17. Kirkus Reviews (review date 15 February 1996)
   18. Publishers Weekly (review date 19 February 1996)
   19. Donna Seaman (review date 15 March 1996)
   20. Adam Mazmanian (review date 15 March 1996)
   21. Eileen Pollack (review date 30 June 1996)
   22. Scott Bradfield (essay date June 1998)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright