I found this book incredibly difficult to get through, and ultimately, I could not finish it. I was deeply uncomfortable the whole time and found the content disturbing and hard to read.

What makes this book pleasurable is the quality of the writing. Unfortunately, the story did not capture me as much as Oates' writing style, but I am grateful for the opportunity to read Fox.

Joyce Carol Oates’s Fox is a chilling and psychologically intricate thriller that probes the dark underbelly of academic privilege and institutional complicity. Set at the elite Langhorne Academy, the novel centers on Francis Fox, a charismatic English teacher whose enigmatic past and disturbing behavior gradually unravel through a polyphonic narrative. Oates constructs Fox as a deeply unsettling figure equal parts aesthete and predator whose manipulations are cloaked in charm and intellectual authority. His “Little Kitten” persona, used to groom vulnerable students, is especially disturbing, and Oates’s psychological precision makes him one of her most haunting antagonists.

The novel’s setting plays a crucial role in amplifying its themes. Langhorne Academy is rendered as a gothic institution, its manicured façade masking systemic failures and moral rot. Oates critiques not just the individual pathology of Fox but the broader culture that enables him: faculty members who look the other way, administrators who prioritize reputation over truth, and a community invested in preserving its elite image. This layered indictment elevates Fox beyond genre fiction into a powerful work of social commentary, echoing the intensity of We Were the Mulvaneys and the institutional critique of Black Girl / White Girl.

Stylistically, Fox is a triumph. Oates blends the atmospheric dread of dark academia with the rigor of a police procedural, shifting perspectives and timelines to create a narrative that is as intellectually demanding as it is emotionally devastating. The nonlinear structure mirrors the psychological disorientation of the characters, while the multiple viewpoints offer a kaleidoscopic understanding of complicity, justice, and trauma. In Fox, Oates refuses easy answers, instead crafting a novel that is both propulsive and profound a masterclass in literary suspense and moral inquiry

As an educator, I have read quite a few books by Joyce Carol Oates. However, this book just didn't click with me. Is her writing beautiful? Absolutely. Would I use examples from it to teach writing to my students? Yes. That being said, I just couldn't get into the story line. I just didn't care about the characters much, and I found that I was wading through to get to the end. Maybe it just wasn't the right book for me at the time. But I do still love her writing. I was just hoping for more because it is an excellent premise.

I think this is the first book by Joyce Carol Oates that I have read and boy have I been missing out! I love a literary mystery and this was a fantastic example of that. I had to buy the physical copy, thats how much I liked this.

DNF - This one was just not for me! I wasn't clicking with the writing style, though the prose was very well-written. Definitely check trigger warnings on this one before going in!

Wow this is a weird book. Mr. Fox's POV chapters are vomit-inducing. There are zero good guys here, so don't expect a hero to walk out of this. The writing is very character-driven, so much so that I stopped caring about the plot about 60% of the way through. I didn't need an answer to the whodunnit though I felt that was fairly obvious. I do wish for more clarity and closure for Mary Ann.
I've read Joyce Carol Oates before. Her short story "Where are you going, where have you been?" is iconic, terrifying. I also read Black Water, which has a unique victim perspective, giving voice to a real person who otherwise would eternally have had none. In this novel, the voice of a child abuser is heard loudest as his grotesque POV infiltrates and infects every other character in the story. There is so much wrong with the outcome of this very long novel. I felt the length like physical pain, not wanting to approach it, wanting it to be over as quickly as possible while the clear, illustrative language dragged in excruciating detail for nearly 700 pages. This is a portrait of a monster, surrounded by monsters, and yet I still have questions. This story will haunt me.
I recommend it if you think you can stomach it.
Thanks to NetGalley and Hogarth for this ARC!

This is one of my favorite authors and I was a little bit leery about this one due to content and because it is such a far cry from her norm. I felt that this book was overly long and just overall repetitive. I felt it just cycled through with the different characters and the only thing that really kept me invested was finding out who the murderer was. There was something about the detective that I really liked though. I think he was complex and interesting. I would like to see what she could do with this kind of character in the future. Thanks for the ARC, NetGalley.

OMG. This was my first JCO book, and it will not be my last.

The subject matter in this book is incredibly triggering. The way JCO writes is similar to the gruesomeness of horror movie directors. I felt so uncomfortable reading parts.

However, she can write so many different perspectives so well.

I want to read all JCO books now.

This book is another successful book writing by Oates. Even with dark writing, she is able to tell a story that makes you cringe but also nervous about the outside world.

2.5 / 5 stars

This was a difficult book to read and is also difficult to review.

Firstly, I was floored when Hogarth reached out to me with an opportunity to review this book. Joyce Carol Oates is an absolute living legend of the literary world. The span of her career is astounding. However, the only time I had ever read anything by her was a short story way back in college (20+ years ago). So I was truly, truly honored to be extended this invitation from the publisher.

However, the synopsis of the book is fairly oblique and I was expecting the novel to be about a con man of sorts and not a serial child abuser. I appreciate that Oates wanted to dive into the psychology of the perpetrator, his victims, and his enablers, but -- to my taste -- that dive was deeper than was necessary.

I may have been willing to stomach the more unseemly aspects of the book had there been any other characters who were likable -- sadly, there really weren't any (with perhaps one exception). And I felt that so many loose threads were left dangling with so many of the character stories. Also, as a mystery/thriller, this one doesn't really strike me as a story that is particularly compelling.

Oates is clearly a skilled author and her prose has really gorgeous moments. But this one just did not work for me based on the content, characters, and lack of compelling mystery.

I'd never read a book by Joyce Carol Oates before and learned very quickly that her style is not for me. It is very flowery and i find that difficult to read/get into the actual story.

I was really looking forward to this book because I love this author. This one starts out with the discovery of a body in a car in the lake of a young girl and that's all it took to get me going into the book. This book had a focus on so many people in this young girls life and it was just a world wind of an investigation. This situation is very complex and the characters are so complicated and a bit dense at time but that just added to the joy of reading this book. I really enjoyed it and I highly recommend .

A deeply uncomfortable story told with multiple PoVs, of the victims and their families harmed by a sexual predator.

Beginning with the discovery of a body in a car in a lake, we learn of a young girl, not named, whom a man is having sex with. Gradually, Joyce Carol Oates expands the focus to the men who find the body, then to a family, separated, and the way the young girl is reluctant to spend time with her father, then to the head mistress of a school who does not want to help police determine if a missing teacher, Francis Fox, is their body, and finally, to the self-absorbed rationalizations of Francis Harlan Fox/Farrell, who is accused of harming a young girl in another town, and who is considering how to get away from the accusations. And because of misogyny, he does, to a different school…..And then another, and another, till he ends up at aprestigious private school in the fictional town of Weiland, New Jersey. Here, we watch him easily and thoroughly manipulate a series of twelve-year-olds, girls primarily, through flattery and drugs, and also hoodwink a number of women, one of whom, when confronted with his actions, simply cannot believe it as it does not accord with her experience of the well-spoken, charming, feminist that he presented.

The police investigation that ensues after the discovery of the body excavates Fox's history, but also yields no definitive suspect for his murder, despite the weeks devoted by Detective Zwander to the investigation.

Oates presents a complex situation with complicated characters over this long and compelling book. The prose captured me immediately, and kept me reading to the very end to its almost surprising end. Along the way, I wanted to bleach my brain several times, after completing each of Fox's PoV chapters, and felt frustration with the adulation and fervent admiration Fox engendered in the town, despite what we know about the self-absorbed, manipulative man, who lived on Consent Street in Wieland (I’m sure the irony was totally intentional).

Even though I was frequently disgusted by Fox, I was absolutely riveted to this book, even when it occasionally slowed down in a couple of spots. And though this does not have a typical mystery story's pacing, with its literary focus on its many characters, this was an excellent novel.

Thank you to Netgalley and to Random House Publishing Group - Random House for this ARC in exchange for my review.

Wow- where do I start? How do I review this novelist on her 58th book? I can only hope I have such a productive career and life as Joyce Carol Oates has. This novel was a wonderful work of fiction. There are few authors that can be so descriptive so you feel like you are experiencing the book in real-time. This is a book where you truly get your money’s worth. Coming in at 651 pages, this is a psychological thriller dealing with some really tough topics- pedophilia, complex family relationships, alcoholism. The novel takes the reader through a police investigation and provides a detailed look at the main characters who are somehow involved either directly or indirectly in this crime. I enjoyed the book. My one weakness is that I would have liked to learned what happened after the crime to all of the characters but I can’t have everything tied up neatly in every story. This is a book that will haunt you after you finish. Give yourself plenty of time to read this book but it is definitely worth the investment of your time. Thank you to Net Galley and Random House for a copy of this book.

I’ve always been a fan of Joyce Carol Oates, and usually I fly through her books—but Fox was a tougher read for me. The pacing felt slower, and I found myself having to really push to get through it. That said, Oates’ writing is always thoughtful and layered, and I can see how this story will resonate with other readers.
It just wasn’t the right fit for me personally, but I’m still looking forward to picking up more of her work in the future.

Oates is a master storyteller, and this is a crackling whodunnit, while also being a too close look in the head of vile predator. Fox is a mix of Humbert Humbert and Tom Ripley a silver tounged con man who doesn't want money, but access to young girls. There are parts of this book that make you want to take a shower but part of its power is how Oates makes you stare right into the abyss.

<i>Wanting to hug Ms. Hood but standing very still. As if tears might spill from her eyes if she moved. The brightly lit library was her refuge, she hated to leave it and return to the rest of her life, in the classroom and in her home, unpredictable to her as a rowboat lurching and swerving along a swollen creek.</i>

By the time the car is found in a ravine near a local nature preserve, the body has been largely dismembered by wildlife, but the car belonged to Francis Fox, the new middle school English teacher at the prestigious private school located in the southern end of New Jersey, a place where the financially struggling local people watch as expensive houses are built in gated subdivisions. As the story goes over Fox's history, both at the school and previously, it's clear that a number of people would have a problem with Fox and one that would most conveniently be solved by his death. But as Detective Zwender looks into the death, most of the people around him would be happier to dismiss it as an accident and his own determination to find out what happened might just destroy him.

Joyce Carol Oates writes about crimes with an eye for the uncomfortable and she's written a lot about girls and young women preyed on by men, so this novel falls in a sweet spot for her, exploring not only how a man might prey on girls, but also how those girls might eagerly participate in their own destruction. She takes her time with this story, giving us the lives of several of the girls in his classes, of the people he interacted with from the head of the school and the librarian he halfheartedly courted to a janitor at the school, adding along the way various parents and people who knew Fox along the way. She's drawing a picture and taking her time. It's effective, and it's a tribute to JCO that she can spend a good hundred pages hinting at the dead man without revealing him.

There are many mentions of Nabokov's Lolita along the way, including a character named Quilty, and while the descriptions of Fox's behavior are not graphic, they are viscerally disturbing, so be aware going in that the subject matter can be hard going.

DNF. Despite the stellar blurbs, I couldn't push through this one. Oates clearly knows her craft—the prose is polished and the boarding school atmosphere appropriately sinister—but something about the execution left me cold.
Francis Fox as a character feels more constructed than lived-in, despite comparisons to Ripley and Humbert Humbert. Those antiheroes had psychological complexity that made their monstrosity compelling; Fox felt like a collection of "mysterious teacher" tropes rather than a fully realized predator. The multiple POV structure, while ambitious, fragments any momentum the mystery might have built.
The pacing drags considerably, with Oates indulging in lengthy psychological exposition that stops the narrative dead. For a book marketed as "galloping," it moves at a glacial pace. The boarding school setting, while atmospheric, never transcends familiar territory.
Perhaps this rewards patient readers who stick with Oates's deliberate style, but I found myself reaching for other books instead. Sometimes even accomplished writers and promising premises don't click.

Fox is not a novel you will finish in one sitting. I have read almost all of Joyce Carol Oates novels and this is one of the most disturbing. The manin character Fox is a teacher who turns out to be someone we don't expect him to be. There is a detective who tries to find out how his car got into an accident and caused his death. You go back and forth and see the man Francis Fox and the horrible things he did to children. In a world where child trafficking is rampant and politicians using pedophile in every other sentence this remarkable novel shows us how a community can be unaware of what is happening to it when you let someone in who you are suposoed to trust and instead use their own power to manipulate children in the most horrific way. This is literary fiction at its best. Oates is 83 years old and create something like this tryly shows the talent she is and that age doesn't matter. Highly recommended. Thanks to Hogarth Press for the read.