The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror

by Joyce Carol Oates

Overview

Winner of the Bram Stoker Award from the Horror Writers Association for Superior Achievement in a Fiction Collection

Including “Big Momma,” winner of 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802189936
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	05/03/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	9,664
File size:	2 MB

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 Jack of Spades, High Crime Area, and The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares, which won the 2011 Bram Stoker Award for Short Horror Fiction. She is the recipient of the National Book Award for them and the 2010 President’s Medal for the Humanities.

Hometown:

Princeton, New Jersey

Date of Birth:

June 16, 1938

Place of Birth:

Lockport, New York

Education:

B.A., Syracuse University, 1960; M.A., University of Wisconsin, 1961

Editorial Reviews

…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 like Connie and poor young Violet of "Big Momma" to their fates. A sense of helplessness is the essence of horror, and Oates conveys that feeling as well as any writer around, whether the powerlessness in question is that of a victim or, as in the title story of The Doll-Master, that of someone who is unable to stop doing harm to others: Obsession can be a kind of vulnerability, too.

The New York Times Book Review - Terrence Rafferty

★ 03/07/2016
Oates (Jack of Spades) convincingly demonstrates her mastery of the macabre with this superlative story collection. Though the titular opening tale sets the creepy tone, narrator Robbie, who starts stealing dolls as an eighth grader, is odd enough that its denouement is less surprising than it could have been. More effective is the Hitchcockian “Equatorial,” in which Mrs. Wheeling, her husband’s third wife, begins to suspect during an excursion to the Galapagos that her scientist spouse may be trying to clear the decks for the fourth Mrs. Wheeling; Oates deftly manipulates the reader through this novella, in part by doling out key bits of backstory that dramatically shift the narrative kaleidoscope. And she truly hits her stride in the stories rooted in apparent normalcy, as in the George Zimmerman riff “Soldier,” and “Big Momma,” in which angry, unloved 13-year-old Violet ends up taking a horrific turn from the Jersey suburbs into the Twilight Zone. This devil’s half-dozen of dread and suspense is a must read. Agent: Warren Frazier, John Hawkins & Associates. (May)

Publishers Weekly

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)

From the Publisher

12/01/2016
This collection of disturbing stories will send chills up readers' spines and have them looking over their shoulders. Each of the tales has its own style, but all shine a light into the dark corners of humanity. (http://ow.ly/Saef305MDNh)—Mark Flowers, Rio Vista Library, CA

School Library Journal

2016-02-17
The prolific Oates (The Man Without a Shadow, 2016, etc.) delivers a sextet of creepy stories to disturb your nights and cast shadows across your days. In the title story, a man waxes eloquent about the doll collection he began keeping as a child when his cousin died of leukemia. Very quickly, it becomes apparent that his "dolls" have a much more sinister significance. In another story, a woman remembers a traumatic time in her past when she was asked to take care of her favorite teacher's house and was instead assaulted and left for dead. A lonely young girl meets a new friend with a big, terrifying secret. A troubled man defends the actions that have landed him in jail as the front page of every newspaper brands him a racist. On holiday in the Galapagos, a wife begins to suspect her dashing older husband is trying to kill her—or is it merely a case of survival of the fittest? In the most effective of these stories, a paranoid narrator, seemingly modeled after so many of Poe's unstable characters, calmly plans and executes a perfect murder—only to have the tables turned. Oates' signature move, at least in these stories, is to end in medias res, or in the middle of things—unlike other authors, who tend to start there. When this works, it causes a lingering sense of dread and discomfort, but sometimes it is merely frustrating, leaving one with a "lady or tiger" sensation. The collection provides some chills and some domestic psychological warfare much in the classic vein of Ruth Rendell, but it does feel a bit uneven and underdeveloped. What it lacks: deep, well-plumbed explorations of truly troubled and disturbing psyches. For readers who like the frisson of psychological horror without too much commitment.

Kirkus Reviews