The God of Nightmares

Fox is a great writer and The God of Nightmares is a masterpiece. I loved everything about it.

I enjoyed Fox's memoire "Borrowed Finery" very much. This book, written before the memoire, covers much of the same territory, but the effort to turn what clearly are parts of Fox's own life into fiction doesn't work all that well. I had to laugh when I discovered Fox giving her own childhood to one of the characters. All of the characters in "The God of Nightmares" are weird in one way or another, except the main character, Helen, who tells the story. She seems pretty ordinary until the last chapter when Fox tries to show us Helen isn't so nice after all. I didn't like this last chapter, which takes place more than 25 years after the main story. Fox tries too hard to tie things up and tell us what happened to each of her characters. I was especially irritated by the way she changed the husband -- but I won't say more about that as it comes as something of a surprise.