MixedTimes Literary SupplementIt is grim, unstinting work, and none of the characters...escapes Oates’s searching eye ... A bleak, relentless story ... Vastly overlong ... Veers into excess ... Woozy, rambling ... There are frequent repetitions of words, phrases, images, ideas. Fox is a dark place in which to spend the amount of time that its writer demands of us, and one finishes it with some relief, suspecting that a terser, leaner approach would have been a good deal more effective.
Claire Kohda
PositiveTimes Literary Supplement (UK)[Bram] Stoker...brought the monster squarely into the everyday present: in his case, a modern place of independent women and new gadgetry ... What Stoker did for the vampire at the end of the nineteenth century, Claire Kohda does for it in our own era ... For much of the novel, Kohda stresses the human part of Lydia’s story ... Only hints of the supernatural are given at first ... Horror fans may find themselves thirsting for more of this vampiric side and less of Lydia’s mortal half, while a final flurry of frantic retribution doesn’t quite compensate for the rather languid pace and lack of incident. But there is much here to mesmerize and beguile readers, not least in Kohda’s prose, which is patient, strange and altogether persuasive.
