SOURCE: Sandall, Robert. “Cliffhangers which Reveal Sheer Madness.” Sunday Times, no. 8575 (11 December 1988).

In the following review of The Secret Life of Houses, Sandall describes Bradfield's writing as stylish, vivid, and dramatic.

Scott Bradfield's apparent conviction that California really is a crazy place, that it is in fact one of the world's psychiatric black spots, may or may not be justified but it provides a superb launch-pad for these confident and stylish fictions. The nine stories which make up Bradfield's first book [The Secret Life of Houses] are peopled with a complete gallery of nutcases: from the averagely deluded through the chronically obsessed and compulsively sadistic all the way across to the murderously psychotic. One character suspects that he is a werewolf. Another schizophrenically torments himself by devising a talkative ghostly alter-ego to haunt his apartment. The maddest of them all, Dolores Starr, grows up to become a highly...