Bellefleur is a novel by Joyce Carol Oates first published in 1980 by E. P. Dutton and reprinted by Obelisk Press in 1987.

The extended family includes members resembling figures from the Grand Guignol: a spiritual savant, homicidal maniac, an incestuous uncle and niece, a scientific boy-wonder, siamese twins, and a female vampire.

The elder members of the clan are ultimately destroyed, but the children break free of the Bellefleur curse and emerge with a measure of independence and optimism.

[3][4] New York Times reviewer John Gardner declares Bellefleur “an awesome construction, in itself a work of genius,” but regrets that “the artifice undermines emotional power, making the book cartoonish.” Gardner forgives Oates her literary idiosyncrasies evident in the novel and acknowledging its “brilliance: “Though Bellefleur is not her best book, in my opinion it's a wonderful book all the same.”[5] “Bellefleur is a work of the imagination and must obey, with both humility and audacity, imagination’s laws…the implausible is granted an authority and honored with a complexity usually reserved for realistic fiction...Bellefleur is a region, a state of the soul, and it does exist; and there, sacrosanct, its laws are utterly logical.”—Biographer Joanne V. Crieghton in Joyce Carol Oates: The Novels of the Middle Years (1992).

[6] Critic John Gardner characterizes the novel as a medieval allegory— caritas versus cupiditas (charity vs. desire)—a struggle for ascendancy between “selflessness” and “selfishness.”[7] Though non-sectarian in her views, Oates is nonetheless “a religious novelist” and Bellefleur “the most openly religious of her books.”[8] Literary critic Joanne V. Creighton describes Bellefleur as a “reworking of nineteenth century genres” and an “imaginative playing out of the dualites at the heart of the American dream and the American character.”[9] Creighton ranks Bellefleur among “our great American novels.”[10]