Short Story Criticism | Bradfield, Scott - Kirkus Reviews (review date 15 September 1990)

Kirkus Reviews (review date 15 September 1990)

SOURCE: Review of Dream of the Wolf, by Scott Bradfield. Kirkus Reviews 58, no. 18 (15 September 1990): 1268-269.

[In the following review, the critic discusses the themes of fantasy and the unconscious mind in the stories of Dream of the Wolf.]

Bradfield follows up his strange and brilliant first novel (The History of Luminous Motion, 1989) with a glittering if uneven collection of 13 short stories [In Dream of the Wolf]—each centered upon a downtrodden loner who retreats into a primordial world of the mind.

In the title piece, a man forsakes his bland everyday life for the wild tundra of his dreams. He dreams of wolves, and in each dream the wolf overtakes the man (“When I dream of the wolf, I am the wolf. I've been wolves in New York, Montana and Beirut. It's as if time and space, dream and reality have just opened up, joined me with...

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