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.
Industry Reviews
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)
