GENERAL INFORMATION
TITLE: DOLLY
AUTHOR: SUSAN HILL
PAGES: 153
PUBLISHER: PROFILE BOOKS
YEAR: 2012
GENRE: HORROR FICTION
BLURB FROM THE COVER
Orphan Edward Cayley is sent to spend the summer with his forbidding Aunt Kestrel at Iylot House, her decaying home deep in the damp, lonely fens. With him is his spoilt, spiteful cousin, Leonora. And when Leonora’s birthday wish for a beautiful doll is thwarted, she unleashes a furious rage which haunts her quiet, subdued cousin for years afterwards.
Much later, and now each other’s only surviving relative, the cousins return to Iylot House. And it becomes horribly apparent that Leonora’s act of violence has had dark and sinister consequences that they can neither anticipate nor escape.
EXTRACT
An autumn night and the fens stretch for miles, open and still. It is dark, until the full moon slides from behind a cloud and over the huddle of gray stone which is Iylot Lock. The hamlet straddles a cross roads between flat field and flat field, with its squat church on the east side, hard by Iylot House and the graveyard in between. On the west side, a straggle of cottages leads to Iylot Farm, whose flat fields bleed into the fens with no apparent boundary.
REVIEW
I thought Dolly was great. Hill offers the perfect, unsettling ghost story. I’ve read a few of Hill’s work including The Woman in Black and In the Springtime of the Year and never been very enamoured. Dolly may change my mind. I thought Hill offered something perfect.
Dolly is narrated by Edward, one of the cousins, in the first person. Edward is a very good narrator. His matter-of-fact retelling of Leonora’s childhood tantrum and the unsettling events that followed gave me the chills. Edward uses very little emotion which I found very creepy. He made shivers crawl down my spine.
Dolly starts in the present with Edward returning to Iylot House after his death, returns to the past and Leonora’s terrible rage then return to the present. This structure works well. The structure gives Dolly a sort of story-within-a-story feel. I felt compelled to read on and catch up with all the story threads.
I was impressed by Hill’s characterisation in Dolly considering how short the novella is. Edward and Leonora are instantly memorable and leap off the page. I sort of loved Leonora even though she was in insufferable brat. I felt sorry for her. Leonora’s mother was just the same. She has no idea how to be a mother and raised her daughter to be a spoilt brat like her. I sort of felt sorry for her. I thought Edward was great.
Dolly is my idea of a perfect ghost story. Strange things happen after Leonora destroys the doll in a fit of rage but they are very subtle. Is something supernatural going on or is there an ordinary explanation? The subtleness of Dolly unnerved me. I love ghost stories that given you the chills when you don’t really know why. Dolly is not over-the-top blood and gore. I hate those kinds of novels. Dolly was perfect – creepy, un-nerving and unsettling. I shared Edward’s horror when he dug up the doll and when he met Leonora’s daughter years later. Tres creepy.
RATING
