31 October 2025

Dear Friends Who Read and Readers Who Are Friends,

In an antique photo album is an aging print of my mother introducing me to a doll about an inch or two taller than I am. It's Christmas morning and I'm three years old. The doll is called Peter Playpal and it is – literally and metaphorically – that year’s big present from Santa Claus. My mother is doing her best Betty Draper imitation in the image: honey blond hair perfectly coiffed, skirt pressed, impeccably straight legs. She has dressed me to look like the doll: a red blazer, short pants, and red socks. In the photo, I seem bewildered.

I have no memories of playing with the doll, but I have found TV ads for the girl’s version of the toy on YouTube. That doll is named Patti Playpal and based on the 60-second black and white commercial she is utterly terrifying. We’re talking Halloween horror movie scary – the sort of doll that replaces you. Or carves you into kebobs. Or chases you into the basement with a meat cleaver. At the very least, the doll is going to wear your clothes (and your shoes) and replace you. In the TV commercial, Patti’s eyes never blink, although I know for a fact that Peter’s eyelids fell shut whenever he bowed his head. After all, I still have the doll.

I also own Patti, which was never mine when I was a child, but my mother bought years later at a yard sale and thought would work well with her annual Victorian Christmas tableaus. When my parents moved to Florida, they gave my wife and me both Peter and Patti, and the pair were part of our Halloween displays here in Vermont for years. That means we have drowned them in tubes of Halloween vampire blood, impaled them, hanged them, and stuck them with dozens of syringes. We've posed them with toy chainsaws and with blenders overflowing with Barbie dolls.

According to family lore, my mother got me the Peter Playpal doll because I used to talk to the mannequins at a department store, now long gone, called Wanamaker’s. (Founder John Wanamaker is famous for saying, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.”) Given the amount of time my mother spent clothes shopping, the fact I talked to mannequins should have surprised no one.

Also, according to family lore, the only time I ever played with it was when I packed Peter into one of those toy pedal-powered fire engines meant for small children, and pushed him down the long flight of stairs in our house. Clearly I was trying to kill him before he came to life and killed me. (In my early-twenties, I did in fact write a short story called “Dolls don’t die.” It was, like all of my short stories from that period, a train wreck.)

One Christmas Eve when my wife and I were newlyweds and spending Christmas with my parents, the two of us – aided and abetted by my brother – took both Peter and Patti Playpal from my mother’s annual Christmas scene in the living room, undressed them, and left them beside the tree as if they were porn stars. My mother was so proud of us when she found them on Christmas morning.

In any case, after coming across that old photo of Peter and me, I ventured up to the attic to take a look at the dolls. For most of my adult life, I only visited them the day before Halloween, and it was always in the context of how my wife and I could use them to create something diabolic in our front yard.

And it had been nine years since my wife and I had used the dolls to terrify small children on Halloween.

So, this time I was visiting them for a different reason: Were there other childhood memories they might trigger? I wasn’t expecting to exhume something tragic; I wasn’t anticipating a wonderful revelation. It was just a little intellectual curiosity.

Instead, however, I was reminded of the reality that we had mummified Patti and decapitated Peter.

I'd forgotten.

Now, that doesn't mean they might not appear as Halloween decorations.

Or, yes, that the two heads might not be massive Christmas ornaments in two months.

But it did mean that the next time my brother and I are reminiscing about our childhoods, I'll have a lot to bring to the conversation.

Happy Halloween, my friends!


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In other news, I have four appearances remaining this fall, and I hope you'll join me. Full details are on the Events page on my website, but I'll be visiting:

Cambridge, Massachusetts on November 5
Worcester, Massachusetts on November 6
Sarasota, Florida on November 15
New York, New York on December 4


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Have you read my latest novel, The Jackal's Mistress, my Civil War "Romeo and Juliet" based on a true story? (I promise, there will never be an exam.) Learn more right here on Goodreads.

Thanks, my friends!

All the best,

Chris
www.chrisbohjalian.com


“The Jackal’s Mistress. . .is destined to be a classic worthy of Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. . .[an] unforgettable read that cements Bohjalian’s placement on the literary Mount Rushmore of American writers.”
-- RAY PALEN, BookReporter