She’s a Doll by Barbara Truelove turns the haunted-doll story upside down

What if the creepy haunted doll isn’t the monster in the story—but the victim who has finally come back to make her killer pay? That’s the deliciously dark premise behind Barbara Truelove’s She’s a Doll, a horror novel that takes the familiar haunted-doll story and gives it a very satisfying twist. Instead of an innocent person becoming the target of an inexplicably murderous antique doll, this time the doll has every reason to be angry. Lucy McQuinn was murdered, and now her ghost has taken up residence in an eighteen-inch porcelain body. She may be small, but she has unfinished business with Kyle, the man who killed her.

There’s something wonderfully subversive about the way Truelove approaches the haunted-doll trope. We’re accustomed to assuming that the doll is the threat. The creepy porcelain face, the old-fashioned clothes, the unnatural movements—everything about a haunted doll is designed to make us wonder what it’s going to do to us.

But why do we automatically assume the doll is out to get us? In She’s a Doll, Lucy has a pretty good reason for being angry. She was murdered, and she’s not interested in allowing her killer to simply carry on with his life. Kyle is the sort of villain who is particularly infuriating because he’s also the sort of person people are inclined to believe. He’s a promising young man, a “nice guy,” and the kind of person whose reputation seems to matter more to the people around him than the women he hurts. And, as Lucy discovers, she isn’t Kyle’s only victim.

Nicola has her own reasons for hating Kyle, but when she tries to tell people what he’s done, nobody wants to believe her, either. It’s much easier to dismiss her as a crazy stalker than to consider the possibility that this seemingly respectable young man might actually be exactly what she says he is.

That dynamic gives She’s a Doll a much deeper purpose beneath all the creepy porcelain and supernatural revenge. Truelove is examining the culture surrounding dead girls—the way women’s suffering can become a story people consume while simultaneously refusing to listen to living women who might actually be able to prevent the next tragedy.

There’s something especially pointed about the fact that the people around Kyle seem so determined to preserve the idea of him as a good guy. His victims become unreliable. His accusers become crazy. His reputation becomes more important than the evidence right in front of everyone. And that makes Lucy’s return all the more satisfying.

She’s a Doll is dark, but it’s also funny. There’s an inherent absurdity to the situation of a vengeful ghost trying to accomplish her murderous objectives while trapped inside an antique doll. Lucy may be terrifying, but she’s also eighteen inches tall and made of porcelain, which creates some wonderfully entertaining complications.

That balance is one of the novel’s greatest strengths. The story doesn’t require Lucy’s rage to be tidy or respectable. She’s angry because she was murdered. She’s angry because nobody believes Nicola. She’s angry because Kyle gets to keep living his life while she gets reduced to a dead girl. And she intends to do something about it.

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Her partnership with Nicola is just as important. At its heart, She’s a Doll is also a story about the importance of having someone who believes you when everyone else would rather look away. The friendship between Lucy and Nicola gives the novel an emotional center that keeps the story from becoming nothing more than a revenge fantasy. There’s a real sense of solidarity here: if the world refuses to protect women from men like Kyle, then maybe the women have to protect each other—and sometimes they might need a ghost in an antique doll to help.

One of my favorite things about She’s a Doll from a craft perspective is the way Truelove plays with time. Apparently, being a ghost does some very strange things to your perception of time. Truelove takes full advantage of that, expanding and compressing time whenever the story needs it. It could easily have become a gimmick, but it never does.

Instead, the manipulation of time feels like a natural extension of Lucy’s supernatural existence. The rules are strange, but they never felt arbitrary to me. Truelove uses the flexibility of ghostly time to control the pacing of the story in a way that kept me completely absorbed. In fact, the strange thing is that the fictional distortion of time seemed to spill over into my own experience of reading the book.

It took me several hours to read She’s a Doll, but it really didn’t feel like several hours. I would sit down to read, completely absorbed in Lucy and Nicola’s increasingly bizarre situation, and then suddenly realize that a couple of hours had passed. This is one of those books that made me actively resist putting it down.

What makes She’s a Doll work so well is that the revenge story isn’t the whole point. Yes, there’s a murdered girl inhabiting a porcelain doll who wants to make her killer suffer. That’s an excellent horror premise all by itself. But Truelove uses that premise to dig into something much uglier and more recognizable: the ways women are disbelieved, how quickly accusations against men can be dismissed, and how readily society will protect a man’s reputation at the expense of the women he has harmed.

Kyle is frightening not because he’s some supernatural monster. He’s frightening because he’s the kind of man people are willing to defend. And Lucy is frightening because she has finally stopped caring whether anyone thinks her anger is justified. That makes She’s a Doll both a creepy haunted-doll story and a gleeful tale of female rage. It’s funny, disturbing, emotionally satisfying, and surprisingly thoughtful about what happens when women refuse to stay quietly dead.

If you enjoy horror with a strong streak of dark humor, stories about women getting revenge, or supernatural fiction that takes a familiar trope and turns it completely on its head, She’s a Doll is definitely worth picking up when it releases September 8. And honestly, I’m going to have a hard time looking at an antique doll quite the same way again.

Have you read any other horror novels that turn the “creepy haunted doll” trope on its head? Tell me about them in the comments!

An advance reader copy of this book (ARC) was provided to me by the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

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