SOURCE: Cooke, Judy. “Private Worlds.” Listener 120 (22 September 1988): 26-7.

In the following review, Cooke describes The Secret Life of Houses as an impressive first collection of stories that combines elements of both science fiction and the modernist fable.

[In The Secret Life of Houses,] desperate characters lope across Scott Bradfield's California, intent on pursuing fantasy and apt to destroy anyone whose concept of reality too readily challenges their own. As the psychiatrist says to the murderess: ‘We do it every day … we appropriate the souls and strengths of other people. It's just that most of us don't have to kill them, babe.’ He proves his point by marrying her—after curing her so thoroughly that she experiences ‘a dark inchoate sadness now, formless and buzzing’ whereas before there was blood (starting with her incestuous Dad's), the smell of meat, and flickering fire on the walls of an imaginary cave...