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"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."--
About the author
JOYCE CAROL OATES is the author of such national bestsellers as
The Falls,
Blonde, and
We Were the Mulvaneys. Her other titles for The Mysterious Press include
Night-Gaunts and Other Tales of Suspense, which features “The Woman in the Window,” selected for The Best American Mystery Stories 2017;
The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror, which won the 2016 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Fiction Collection;
The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares, which won the 2011 Bram Stoker Award for Short Horror Fiction; and
Jack of Spades. She is the recipient of the National Book Award for
them and the 2010 President’s National Humanities Medal.
Summary
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.
Additional text
Praise for The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror:
“Oates’s brand of horror has never required the invocation of other worlds: This world is terrible enough for her. Everything she writes, in whatever genre, has an air of dread, because she deals in vulnerabilities and inevitabilities, in the desperate needs that drive people . . . to their fates. A sense of helplessness is the essence of horror, and Oates conveys that feeling as well as any writer around.” —Terrence Rafferty, New York Times Book Review
“Does any writer around do literary creepy like Joyce Carol Oates? . . . The terrifying tales in The Doll-Master . . . are certain to stick in your mind long after you’ve turned the last page . . . The stories always have an undercurrent of menace poised to break through at any moment.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“One of the stranger parts of the human condition may be our deep fascination, and at times troubling exploration, of the darker aspects of our nature . . . No other author explores the ugly, and at times, blazingly unapologetic underbelly of these impulses quite like Joyce Carol Oates in The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror. This is a collection of six frightening—and deeply disturbing—short stories . . . Stories that . . . stay with the reader long after they’ve turned the final twisted page.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“Throughout her extraordinarily prolific career, Joyce Carol Oates’s work has always embraced aspects of the macabre. In her new collection, The Doll-Master, she relishes moments of gothic melodrama, while rooting them firmly in grindingly ordinary American lives . . . It’s a collection that displays Oates’s ability to inhabit distinctive voices to chilling effect.” —Guardian (UK)
“Bone-chilling . . . At the heart of each story is a predator-prey relationship, and what makes them so terrifying is that most of us can easily picture ourselves as the prey, at least at some time during our lives.” —Minneapolis Star-Tribune
“Oates convincingly demonstrates her mastery of the macabre with this superlative story collection . . . This devil’s half-dozen of dread and suspense is a must read.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
