Horrifically gripping

 

5 stars

I honestly confess that at a few points whilst reading Fox I nearly walked away. This is dark and horrifically deviant stuff made even more real by Joyce Carol Oates's masterful ability to deep dive into the mind and motivations with such clarity as to feel authentic. No blushes spared. We know these characters inside out whether we want to or not. That applies to a predatory paedophile, his victims and those around him in tight and loose orbits. High praise that this microscopic treatment was equally applied to Princess Di, a dog of the most precocious nature, and her rather naively trusting human, the headmistress of the Langhorne Academy, P. Cady. A frolicking, highly animated humorous duo, where Di is all instinctive action, P. Cady is gobsmackingly obtuse. Bless her. Of the whole book, these were my favourite characters as they provided calm breathing space for the revelations to come.

This book has the distinction of being as repellent as it is magnetic. When the nature of Francis Fox's crimes are known the reader feels a compulsion to understand what happens next, why it happens and who brought it about whilst feeling nauseated in parallel. The story arch took me places I did not expect, both good and bad, and introduced me to the quiet players who would come, in small and large parts, to mete out justice, of a sort. No lesser author could have pulled this off. I was gripped, even through the rather lengthy mental process and inner dialogue most characters enjoyed. Boy, they went on and on. The better for the omnipotent reader to understand them. I simply had to know what happened to Francis Fox as well as the characters we get to know in intimate detail. 

Fox is a shocking book but one of such irresistible magnitude I could not put it down. Lolita tipped on her head in the confines of a private school in a quiet New Jersey town, this is a thriller like no other.