Bellefleur is part of a trilogy of Gothic romances: Bellefleur (1980), A Bloodsmoor Romance (1983), and Mysteries of Winterthurn (1986). A Bloodsmoor Romance, set in nineteenth-century New England, is the most self-indulgent of the three. A tedious, elderly female narrates, in fits and starts, the chronicle of the five Zinn sisters, the first of whom, Deirdre, is abducted in a balloon at the beginning of the novel. The style is verbose, disjointed, and parenthetical, liberally sprinkled with quotations from bad nineteenth-century verse and prose documents of equally dismal style. It supposedly deals with the lot of the nineteenth-century woman, but in such a fantastic and allusive way that it appears as if Oates were taking a holiday from serious fiction. In the third novel, Mysteries of Winterthurn (like Bellefleur, set in upper New York state), Oates explores the Gothic sense of terror by analyzing three unsuccessful cases of the...