Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Winner of the Bram Stoker Award from the Horror Writers Association for Superior Achievement in a Fiction Collection
Including "Big Momma," a finalist for the International Thriller Writers Award for Best Short Story
From one of our most important contemporary writers, The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror is a bold, haunting collection of six stories.
In the title story, a young boy becomes obsessed with his cousin's doll after she tragically passes away from leukemia. As he grows older, he begins to collect "found dolls" from the surrounding neighborhoods and stores his treasures in the abandoned carriage house on his family's estate. But just what kind of dolls are they? In "Gun Accident," a teenage girl is thrilled when her favorite teacher asks her to house-sit, even on short notice. But when an intruder forces his way into the house while the girl is there, the fate of more than one life is changed forever. In "Equatorial," set in the exotic Galapagos, an affluent American wife experiences disorienting assaults upon her sense of who her charismatic husband really is, and what his plans may be for her.
In The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror, Joyce Carol Oates evokes the "fascination of the abomination" that is at the core of the most profound, the most unsettling, and the most memorable of dark mystery fiction.
Synopsis
Bold and haunting, The Doll-Master and Other Tales is a collection of six psychologically daring stories from Joyce Carol Oates.
In the title story, a boy becomes obsessed with his cousin's doll after she tragically passes away, and as he grows older, he begins to collect "found dolls" from surrounding neighborhoods. But just what kind of dolls are they? In "Gun Accident," a teenage girl is delighted to house-sit for her favorite teacher, until an intruder forces his way inside the old Colonial--changing more than one life forever. The Doll-Master closes with a taut bibliomystery, about the owner of a middling chain of mystery bookstores whose plan to take over a rare bookshop in scenic New Hampshire derails into a game of verbal cat-and-mouse that threatens to have real-life consequences.
Throughout the collection, Oates evokes "the fascination of the abomination" that is at the core of the most profound, the most unsettling, and the most memorable of dark mystery fiction.