The God of Nightmares

by Paula Fox

Book Overview

In 1941, twenty-three-year-old Helen Bynum leaves home for the first time and sets out from rural New York to find her Aunt Lulu, an aging actress in New Orleans. There she finds a life of passion and adventure, possibilities and choices. Falling in with a bohemian group of intellectuals, she discovers romance and sex, friendship and risk, her world mirrored by the steamy mystery of the French Quarter.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393322874
• ISBN13: 9780393322873
• Release Date: June 2002
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.6" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

This is a masterpiece

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

Excellent writing and characters, not so great plot

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.