SOURCE: Upchurch, Michael. Review of Dream of the Wolf, by Scott Bradfield. Seattle Times (13 January 1991): K7.

In the following review, Upchurch offers a tepid assessment of Dream of the Wolf, remarking that Bradfield's short stories are not as good as his novel The History of Luminous Motion.

With his first novel, The History of Luminous Motion, Scott Bradfield drew readers into a fictional California as sinister and volatile as Nathanael West's. This collection of stories [Dream of the Wolf]—many written before the novel—displays a similar gleeful drkness, but doesn't cast quite the spell that Luminous Motion did. Bradfield tries out a number of genres—science fiction, ghost story, horror tale—and gives them all a similarly jaunty treatment: grisly, macabre, surreal. His favorite trick is to lift undigested self-help cliches and psycho-babble—“You weren't secure enough in your individuality to allow me to be myself”—and...