“She’s a Doll”
By Barbara Truelove
Ezeekat Press
When it comes to horror, I’m a chicken-and-a-half.
So when my indie bookstore coworker chose a spooky title for October’s discussion — “She’s a Doll,” by Australian author Barbara Truelove — I flinched.
But I needn’t have. Before the story even starts, there’s a content warning (from the POV of a primary character) that made me laugh. Though the list kicks off with topics you’d expect (murder, sexual assault, suicidal thoughts, strong language, etc.), it wraps up with “and one very large spider.” Plus, the character tells us that Lucy — a murdered young woman whose spirit comes to possess an old porcelain doll — is a liar who “will get a little slippery when it comes to the small stuff, the details. I know this is probably a bitch move […] but I need you to know up front: Lucy’s not above twisting the facts to make a story a little neater, a little nicer.”
I’d forgotten all about this disclaimer as I cruised through this darkly comic novel, but it’s worth revisiting, particularly when one arrives at the postscript “Book Group Questions” that go delightfully off the rails. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start at the start.
The book opens with Lucy, newly graduated from an online business administration program, attending a tea party thrown by Ginger, a gorgeous and popular former high school classmate. Lucy views the event as a cosplay opportunity for her homemade Mad Hatter outfit, but when she arrives and sees everyone dressed in their finest clothes, she cringes.
And when pics from the party appear on Instagram, Lucy’s best friend Krissy — to whom Lucy had lied about her plans — leaves a judgy comment. (Oops.) Lucy tries to contact Krissy to explain, but instead reaches Krissy’s twin brother Kyle, who soon shows up with a bottle of vodka at the house Lucy shares with her grandmother. Lucy lets him in, but when she resists his sexual advances, he clamps his hands around her throat and murders her.
Truelove writes, “The last thing I saw wasn’t Kyle but what was behind him. Four dolls, sitting on a bookshelf, eyes staring, feet hanging. A cowgirl, a ballerina, a schoolteacher, and a bride. When you die, there’s a brief moment where you become unstuck from your body. A splintering. If you’re quick enough — and desperate enough — you can re-stick yourself to an object in the immediate vicinity. In hindsight, I should’ve picked the cowgirl.”
Despite Lucy’s delightfully snarky narrative voice, the 40 pages that follow this moment of transference are a bit of a slog because Lucy, traumatized and new to the afterlife, can’t move or communicate with anyone. (There’s a creative writing challenge for you.) Her soul is simply stuck, with little to no hope of that changing. So although Lucy’s existential holding pattern makes narrative sense, it nonetheless demands some patience from the reader while Lucy slowly figures out how to move and control time. Then, after landing on the shelf of a local thrift store, Lucy notices that an employee’s hearing aid is somehow picking up Lucy’s thoughts.
Thankfully, this is where the story gathers momentum and never looks back. Lucy wants vengeance — specifically, she wants to murder Kyle. But her human ally, Nikola (the thrift store worker), points out that if she does this for Lucy, she’ll spend the rest of her life in prison, so Nikola cooks up a Plan B: to haunt and troll Kyle in creepy ways. Truelove writes, “You’d think I, being the ghost and all, would have more input into the actual haunting thing. But mostly, I just sat in her backpack. Injected a witty one-liner here and there, and watched her work. And boy did she work.”
How does it all end? I won’t give that away here. But I will say there’s a sweetness to this light horror-comedy that I wasn’t expecting; and while you might think the whole possessed-doll trope has been done to death, Truelove somehow makes it fun again in a new way.
So if you’re hedging like I was, but looking for a season-appropriate Halloween read, come on in. The sassy afterlife is fine.
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