Fox reads more like a short story collection than it does a novel, with each story vaguely echoing rather than building upon the last. Fox, Oyeyemi playfully casts and recasts these two central characters into a series of loosely connected love stories. Fox’s imagination, she empathizes with the fictional characters in his stories and challenges him to do likewise. Perhaps because Mary is also a figment of Mr. Fox claims to be in love with his invented Mary, he has a real life wife named Daphne whom he mistreats by routinely ignoring her. To her complaint he simply replies, “It’s ridiculous to be so sensitive about the content of fiction.” So saying, he attempts to wash his hands of responsibility for his other female characters, killed off with excessive violence and gore. Fox is a professional writer of fiction, not a fearsome castle dweller, and Mary is merely one of his characters. Fox does not shrink away when Mary accuses him of murder in the opening chapter. Fox’s horrible intentions and triumphs over him through the power of her narration. Fox by recounting in the form of a dream the murder she watched him commit, using such detail that the menacing Mr. Fox murders and dismembers all of his wives until his soon-to-be wife Lady Mary visits his castle, discovers his chamber of bodies, and manages to avoid her fate. Fox, Helen Oyeyemi’s fourth novel, takes its name from the English version of the Bluebeard fairytale - in which a Mr.

Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi