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Synopsis:

Barbie meets Scream with a 90s nostalgia twist in this horror romp from Bless Your Heart author Lindy Ryan.

Horror author Jill has just moved to suburban New Jersey, hoping to fit in with the new PTA moms and maybe not weird everyone out with her Final Girl coffee mug. You know. Make some real friends.

But then a plastic face-masked serial killer begins slashing their way through town, one overly made-up mom at a time. The police are incredulous. The moms are indignant. And Jill is slowly wrapped into a killer’s murderous spree, until she might just be the last woman standing.

A delightfully murderous novel that is equal parts scathing and salacious, Dollface will win you over with its gossip and gore, one body at a time.

Review:

The plot summary of Dollface sounds like the setup to a great horror novel. Two sisters are home when their mother kills herself, and they make a pact to always take care of each other. Jill becomes a horror writer and Kitty becomes an internet influencer. When Jill’s husband moves the family from the west coast to the east coast, the sisters are split up, and Jill has to figure out how to navigate her new life, which includes Darla, the neighbor who brings a welcome basket, wants to become her friend, and insists that Jill becomes involved in the local PTA. Jill meets the other PTA members and immediately after, they start to be killed or severely injured, and it is only a matter of time before Jill feels like she might be next. For as interesting as this novel could have been, the writing, the character development, and the telling of the story makes this a novel that could be the biggest disappointment of the year.

The way the story unfolds is so bland and mediocre that I could not wait to be finished reading it. The beginning starts interesting but before too long, there is no emotional development, no character depth and really not a single interesting quality in any of the characters. The only thing that Jill can rely on to help her navigate the other members of the PTA getting stabbed and maimed is that she is a horror author, proven by wearing horror t-shirts all of the time and wondering if they are inappropriate. Much of the writing is bland, uninspired, and extremely repetitive, so bad that it could be turned into a drinking game. Each time it is mentioned that Jill is “a horror author”, she has “a darling husband”, that the house they move into is “creaky-not-creepy”, her son likes “kaiju” (not any specific one like Godzilla or King Kong or Clifford the Big Red Dog, just “kaiju”), and Darla is her “new sweet neighbor”, we have to take a shot. Of course we also would not get very far into the novel at all. The weirder aspect of this is that lack of emotional depth in any character throughout this novel. Jill does not have much real visceral response to the crimes happening around her. She cares much more about solving the murders since she is, you know, a horror author. She does not express much about her feelings of danger or fear about the things going on around her, about how all of the new people that she is meeting are suddenly ending up victims to violence. Even by the time she does fear for her own life, it does not feel too urgent, she takes no steps to protect herself or her family, but is more like, “Well. I guess I’m next.” Her husband is supposed to be military, but there is not any mention of a gun in the house or any weapons to protect her or her son when her husband is away with his government work. The connection that she does have with her husband is one of the better aspects of the novel. I love when main characters have strong relationships with their partners (and even better still when they trust their partners enough to ask them for help with the problems), but after a few scenes of them having the most uninteresting lovemaking scenes I have ever read, I started to think that Jill is not connected to her life at all, that there is no passion in anything, even when she is having sex. This lack of real thrill in her life and the flatness of her as a character is consistent throughout. Probably the most irritating aspect of Dollface is the subplot of Jill trying to find the next horror novel that she is supposed to write. Characters struggling to write the next bestseller is the most lazy, boring plot someone can dream up. Nobody cares, and nobody is interested. Jill also mentions many many times that she is a “horror author” yet she has only written one novel (a bestseller of course), and she is having issues with coming up with anything for a sequel. This thread of trying to brainstorm a new horror novel is not only uninspired and generic but is also abandoned about halfway through because quite honestly it goes nowhere.

The repetition of phrases, the lack of emotional depth in the characters, and the generic plot movement makes me think that if I were to read a novel that was heavily written or edited with Chat GPT or another AI program, it would feel like this. I will never accuse anyone of using an AI program to write their novels, and to be fair I have not read any of Lindy Ryan’s other books to see if this writing is consistent with her previous works. This is not what I am saying. I am saying that I have read enough books to get a feeling that if I were handed AI generated fiction, it would likely have many of the same characteristics as this writing. 

Dollface is like a poorly remodeled house that still has good bones. A story about anxiety of moving to a place where nobody knows you, meeting an overbearing and potentially dangerous neighbor in a brand new house, surrounded with nobody you can trust, and a killer on the loose sounds like a great story. Many of the broad strokes of the story are interesting, and I would love to read this again with better characters, more creativity, and characters that actually feel tension and danger in the situation. 

I received Dollface as an ARC through Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.