[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 psycho-babble—“You weren't secure enough in your individuality to allow me to be myself”—and put them in Grand Guignol settings.

In “The Darling,” a mass-murderer undergoes unlikely therapy. In “Ghost Guessed,” a telephone salesman exchanges corporeal status with his obnoxious ghost. Dreams, of being a wolf or of devastating earthquakes, have unlikely ramifications in “real” life. Mayhem and misery are blanketed with brand-names for a dissonant, comical effect.

The standout, “Dazzle,” is about a dog who's fond of “pastry, philosophies of language and Third World political theory.” Other tales suffer from being too “smoothly improbable, at once perfectly real and perfectly contrived”—as a Bradfield character describes “the world of books.”

If you're new to Bradfield, try his novel [The History of Luminous Motion], now in paperback, first.