SOURCE: Seaman, Donna. Review of Dream of the Wolf, by Scott Bradfield. Booklist 87 (1 November 1990): 500.

In the following review, Seaman praises Dream of the Wolf for its fascinating prose and eerie, unsettling narratives.

Bradfield's first novel, The History of Luminous Motion, is an eerie and preternatural tale of a seven-year-old boy who kills people. Murder occupies Bradfield again in this unsettling collection of short stories [Dream of the Wolf]. In “The Darling,” a woman calmly kills the men in her life, while in “Sweet Ladies, Good Night, Good Night,” a man kills a rival. These are premediated murders, committed in a blandly psychotic manner. Bradfield's characters are hypnotized by their inner conflicts between primitive, animalistic forces and the resilient desire for the normal things in life—love and money. Bradfield's metaphysic is a mix of existentialism and National Enquirer stories, while his prose fascinates like a snake—sinuous and...