Criticism > Short Story Criticism > Bradfield, Scott - Michael Upchurch (review date 13 January 1991)

Bradfield, Scott - Michael Upchurch (review date 13 January 1991)

Michael Upchurch (review date 13 January 1991)

SOURCE: Upchurch, Michael. Review of Dream of the Wolf, by Scott Bradfield. Seattle Times (13 January 1991): K7.

[In the following review, Upchurch offers a tepid assessment of Dream of the Wolf, remarking that Bradfield's short stories are not as good as his novel The History of Luminous Motion.]

With his first novel, The History of Luminous Motion, Scott Bradfield drew readers into a fictional California as sinister and volatile as Nathanael West's. This collection of stories [Dream of the Wolf]—many written before the novel—displays a similar gleeful drkness, but doesn't cast quite the spell that Luminous Motion did. Bradfield tries out a number of genres—science fiction, ghost story, horror tale—and gives them all a similarly jaunty treatment: grisly, macabre, surreal. His favorite trick is to lift undigested self-help cliches and...

[The entire page is 299 words long]

Join eNotes

The above is a free excerpt. Get total access to this content with the:

eNotes Pass