SOURCE: Review of The Night of the Funny Hats, by Elspeth Davie. Publishers Weekly 218, no. 7 (15 August 1980): 43.

In the following review of The Night of the Funny Hats, the critic celebrates Davie for the imaginativeness of her short fiction.

An air of ominous expectancy permeates these 15 short stories [The Night of the Funny Hats] by Scottish writer Davie, her third collection. Through all of them there is a deep, sometimes desperate sense of loneliness and alienation, a grasping after the mystery of existence. The characters represent abstract forces. Some have the responsibility of guiding or showing the way, some of holding things together. Some represent nemesis, others are angels of truth. Some are passengers in transit on a journey representing life. Some are talkers, others are listeners—and all are questing after an inexpressible assurance about the meaning of things. Like Wordsworth, Davie believes that in childhood one sees...