SOURCE: Gardner, Anthony. Review of The Secret Life of Houses, by Scott Bradfield. Encounter 72 (March 1989): 54.

In the following excerpt, Gardner praises The Secret Life of Houses, commenting that the stories combine a dark sense of humor with a taste for fantasy, without trivializing the serious elements of each tale.

This collection [The Secret Life of Houses] combines a wonderfully inventive, dark sense of humour with a strong taste for fantasy, and yet manages never to belittle the serious issues in question.

Bradfield prefaces his first tale with a quotation from Nietzsche—“Without the dream one would have found no occasion for a division of the world”—and the tension between the material life and the life of the imagination is his constant theme, though one that each of the nine stories deals with in quite a different way. In “The Dream of the Wolf,” Larry Chambers finds himself...