[Death Suite] shows Rooke in full command of his unique talents. His imagination moves agilely between the surreal and superreal, the kinky supernatural and the logically inexplicable, the banal and the familiar. His style can go from baroque black dialect, to breathless stream of consciousness, to laconic hardboiled detective narrative. The stories focus on people at critical points-of-no-return in their lives. In Rooke's vision, people and society are corrupt, corrupting, and vicious, sometimes merely futile and vain, occasionally sublime. Perhaps the most exciting talent in Canadian fiction since Leonard Cohen.

"Language and Literature: 'Death Suite'," in Choice (copyright © 1982 by American Library Association), Vol. 19, No. 8, April, 1982, p. 1071.