SOURCE: Laidlaw, Marc. “Writing and Religion: Unreal but Loaded.” American Book Review 13, no. 4 (October 1991): 14.

In the following review of Cat Scratch Fever, Laidlaw describes Kelly's fictions as “a myriad of dazzling forms.”

Kelly concentrates on cause-effect as a single organism. In fact, the first bewitching tale in Cat Scratch Fever, “The Scribe,” wryly portrays the very act of seeking cause (within-cause-within-cause) as work best suiting a monk completely isolated from the complex world of sensation, where cause is a hopeless muddle. Yet even this futurist scribe knows that his work is no more than crabbed annotation on broad strokes first passionately penned by life itself and reduced to stiff artificial schematics by successive generations of interpreters ever farther removed from the heart of things.

Kelly is capable of creating entire genres from the modulations of one mood, small kingdoms that may be entered at will with concentration the...