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The Doll Maker
A story of a young girl, caught in the dreadful fascination of willing slavery, the agony of a conscious victim who cannot escape the mordant mastery of an egomaniac practicing unknown horrors.
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First published January 1, 1953
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
January 26, 2014
Every once in a while I am reminded of all the authors I have yet to discover, thank goodness. Sarban I had never even heard of, until I came across him on of those late night Google odysseys. Apparently he was a British diplomat, John William Wall, who, besides being diplomatic in the Middle East, also quietly wrote a few creepy stories and novels in the fifties with no ambition to publish. Published they were, and still in print, so there is no excuse not to read them.
The Doll Maker is set in a girls' boarding school somewhere in the misty English countryside. At first I wasn't sure how old the protagonist, Clara, was. Somehow I got the idea that she was thirteen or fourteen, and, considering the trouble she gets in, was immensely relieved when it is stated that she is in fact eighteen. You see, this is not a sweet coming-of-age story about doe-eyed school girls. It is more like Fifty Shades of Puppeteering, with doe-eyed school girls succumbing to a crazed puppet master. Literal-minded horn dogs needn't bother with this though; it is not that kind of SM. Although there is dialogue such as this:
“You must be a stern master, and if I try to break the spell you must double it and treble it, chain me down in the deepest dungeon in your castle, imprison me in the hollow of an oak in your enchanted wood. You must not let me go!”
“Ah, no,” he said with wondering tenderness. “Dungeons I have and hollow oaks, but not for you. One ancient ceremony of bondage is enough. If you want to be my slave I'll perform it"
But I am getting ahead of myself. The Doll Maker is Niall, the thirty-something son of a prominent family living close to the boarding school. He roams around the woods, carving small wooden dolls with Grim, his "sleek black pussy", in tow. How this is attractive to teenage girls is not clear to me, but perhaps this was considered hot in the fifties. Anyway, Clara starts taking Latin lessons from his mother, proving that higher education can lead to no good, while Niall sits in a corner ogling her and making sketches. Clara is soon under his spell and happily poses for him to provide him with material for a new doll. Nothing ominous about that at all.
Well, ancient bonding rituals have a tendency to go awry, or so I've heard, and soon Clara finds out that being somebody's puppet isn't all it's cracked up to be.
It's an eerie, well-written and engrossing little novel (or novella, I can never tell), which should be read in one sitting, late at night, with a glass of brandy and a pen in hand, because believe me, you'll want to take notes.
The Doll Maker is set in a girls' boarding school somewhere in the misty English countryside. At first I wasn't sure how old the protagonist, Clara, was. Somehow I got the idea that she was thirteen or fourteen, and, considering the trouble she gets in, was immensely relieved when it is stated that she is in fact eighteen. You see, this is not a sweet coming-of-age story about doe-eyed school girls. It is more like Fifty Shades of Puppeteering, with doe-eyed school girls succumbing to a crazed puppet master. Literal-minded horn dogs needn't bother with this though; it is not that kind of SM. Although there is dialogue such as this:
“You must be a stern master, and if I try to break the spell you must double it and treble it, chain me down in the deepest dungeon in your castle, imprison me in the hollow of an oak in your enchanted wood. You must not let me go!”
“Ah, no,” he said with wondering tenderness. “Dungeons I have and hollow oaks, but not for you. One ancient ceremony of bondage is enough. If you want to be my slave I'll perform it"
But I am getting ahead of myself. The Doll Maker is Niall, the thirty-something son of a prominent family living close to the boarding school. He roams around the woods, carving small wooden dolls with Grim, his "sleek black pussy", in tow. How this is attractive to teenage girls is not clear to me, but perhaps this was considered hot in the fifties. Anyway, Clara starts taking Latin lessons from his mother, proving that higher education can lead to no good, while Niall sits in a corner ogling her and making sketches. Clara is soon under his spell and happily poses for him to provide him with material for a new doll. Nothing ominous about that at all.
Well, ancient bonding rituals have a tendency to go awry, or so I've heard, and soon Clara finds out that being somebody's puppet isn't all it's cracked up to be.
It's an eerie, well-written and engrossing little novel (or novella, I can never tell), which should be read in one sitting, late at night, with a glass of brandy and a pen in hand, because believe me, you'll want to take notes.
February 10, 2017
A beautiful, eerie novella from a master stylist of oneiric supernatural horror. The Doll Maker is a lost gem which explores Sarban's favourite themes of oppressor vs oppressed and the mysterious, ineffable strangeness of our lives and environments. The imagery of the puppet show in particular is unforgettable.
September 20, 2024
This is much more of a literary horror story than its cover and précis may suggest. The writing has a spare, understated quality reminiscent of Arthur Machen, who was an influence on the author.
It is set in a girls' boarding school somewhere in the English countryside in the winter, with the protagonist, 18 year old Clara, staying at the school over the Christmas holiday to study for Oxford entrance as her parents are overseas.
A prominent family living close to the school invite her and the Headmistress for dinner. Clara takes an interest in 30 year old Niall, who roams around the woods, carving small wooden dolls with his cat Grim.
That a potential Oxford student would take an interest in such a man asks a lot from the reader, but the strength of Sarban is in other aspects of the story, specifically how he represents the lonesome emptiness that dwells in a boarding school between terms, a sort of gnawing absence that reflects the Clara’s anxious uncertainty, on the threshold of adulthood and major life changes.
Sarban was the pen name of John William Wall who was a British diplomat in the Middle East for thirty years. He wrote some stories during the 1950s with no intention to publish them. He wrote an alternate-history novel, The Sound of His Horn, which was his most successful book, but recently Tartarus Books have reissued several of his collections.
It is set in a girls' boarding school somewhere in the English countryside in the winter, with the protagonist, 18 year old Clara, staying at the school over the Christmas holiday to study for Oxford entrance as her parents are overseas.
A prominent family living close to the school invite her and the Headmistress for dinner. Clara takes an interest in 30 year old Niall, who roams around the woods, carving small wooden dolls with his cat Grim.
That a potential Oxford student would take an interest in such a man asks a lot from the reader, but the strength of Sarban is in other aspects of the story, specifically how he represents the lonesome emptiness that dwells in a boarding school between terms, a sort of gnawing absence that reflects the Clara’s anxious uncertainty, on the threshold of adulthood and major life changes.
Sarban was the pen name of John William Wall who was a British diplomat in the Middle East for thirty years. He wrote some stories during the 1950s with no intention to publish them. He wrote an alternate-history novel, The Sound of His Horn, which was his most successful book, but recently Tartarus Books have reissued several of his collections.
June 9, 2014
Another slim novel of subdued terror from the hardly-prolific Sarban. The concept - a weirdo craftsman creates beautifully strange lifelike dolls - is ably handled by the author's fine prose and a steadily mounting unease. The ending could have been a little stronger, but it's still a genuinely odd and creepy tale.
February 9, 2022
This was a very interesting story, Clare resides at a boarding school studying for her Oxford exams. One night she climbs the wall of the property next door and meets a mysterious man named Niall, the Doll Maker. The story had a dark twisted undertone without being blatant about it. I really enjoyed it, it really left me thinking after it was all over.
October 6, 2025
Creepy story from the 1950s about a teen girl at a boarding school who meets a local lad who's not quite right in the head. But she doesn't discover this until they've been hanging out for a while. Not out and out horror but more subtly offputting.
September 8, 2023
This collection of stories is the first work by Sarban that I have read, I've probably read one of his stories in an anthology which led me to searching him out, but what story it was I can't remember. He is actually quite an interesting writer, though his works were never widely published and even recent reprints have been fancy and lovely, but limited editions which are relatively expensive*. Almost all the reviews I have seen concentrate on 'The Doll Maker', which may be because it has been published as a novella, but the edition I read, and quite a few of those listed on Goodreads, include two further stories 'The Trespassers' and 'A House of Call' and my review will concentrate on those two stories but what I say applies equally to 'The Doll Maker'.
'A House of Call' is the shortest story in the collection, and in many ways the most conventional and displays what is good in Sarban's storytelling and what I find tiresome. It is a classic country house tale set at Christmas with a house full of people and as midnight approaches on Christmas Eve they tell ghost stories. Eventually the last story comes from, Mr. Beniston , a man recently retired from colonial service in India, who is more-or-less a stranger to everyone. He tells of being on long-leave ** and taking a motoring holiday along back roads and lanes, being forced to stop for the night on a dark and lonely unpaved road and seek shelter in an isolated farm and after retiring to bed there are events, only known through voices and sounds, which suggest the impossibly fantastic. The story displays all Sarban's strengths in creating atmosphere and conjuring a sense of malevolence and threat, within settings redolent of the weird, uncanny and unknown. He is also one of the numberless English writers who have a lyrical love and attachment to the countryside and find within it a home for unregenerate, dark even pagan forces such as Saki convey's so brilliantly in 'Gabriel Ernst' and 'The Music on the Hill'. It is not a conventional ghost tale a la M.R. James, more like a Robert Aickman story, but it does have the obsession with history, of the genus loci of place and how it echoes down from past to present of M.R. James or H.P. Lovecraft.
All these elements are present in the other two stories and, I believe, Sarban's other writings, but I now want to discuss what I don't like and, my first complaint is the idea of English countryside as containing a secret dark heart just waiting to burst forth. My problem is that I have never found any secret genus loci or malevolence waiting to be discovered in the English countryside. In fact I couldn't imagine it having one. As a little boy I encountered real, raw and mysterious nature in the Adirondack mountains and forest of upstate New York and later in the stark hard landscape of Dingle and Connacht in Ireland I fell in love with a land were the abandoned tiny, poor, fields and their ruined cottages left by famine victims and fleeing emigrants projected a sense of place, history and horror that reduced the England countryside to the twee and naff.
I must also mention that Sarban's language which at times makes my skin crawl with disgust and as an example I would mention his use of the word slatternly - it is typical word for the time and of a writer of his class. It is revoltingly pejorative and always accompanied by adjectival words about the woman and her clothes such as dirty, untidy, grubby, unclean, messy, torn, unmended. It is always used against poor women, women who have no husband, women who sexually available and invariably judgemental.
My other problem with Sarban is also my problem with James, Lovecraft, Aickman or any of the classic writers of horror - their sense of the monstrous is too domestic and safe. If the past echoes and haunts some lonely path in an English field what is it going to do at places such as Vélodrome d'Hiver in Paris, the fortress of Terezin in the Czech Republic, the National Stadium in Santiago de Chile and the Olympic Village in Sarajevo? They, and countless other places, would broadcast a memory of horror loud and dreadful enough to send anyone insane who came near them. As it is I doubt if many people under 60 would even recognise or remember what terrible things happened at them.
The other story, 'The Trespassers' is even more interesting both for what it says about Sarban and also about what subjects did and did not cause concern to publishers in 1953. The story is about two boys, Conan and Roger from a country town, 15 years old, they are sons of shopkeepers/clerks/tradesmen boys who would leave school at 16 and go into apprenticeships, they aren't working class, they respectable lower class and understanding the class position of a character in so much English fiction of this sort is essential and within this story in particular. School has finished for the summer and the boys spend their time exploring the countryside on their bicycles and they discover a hidden/empty/abandoned park (which means the lands and gardens attached to a country house) which they explore and find a lake with a island in the middle which they set out to explore.
The story has all Sarban's excellent sense of place and atmosphere but without the clunky historical elements of 'A House of Call' but before discussing the story further I must pause to discuss Sarban's writing in general. His writings, including this story and 'The Dollmaker', have a strong submission and dominance themes along with undertones S&M that has led some to claim that Sarban was a misogynist. I have not read enough of his work to draw a firm conclusion but 'The Trespassers' would suggest that Sarban was not simply a misogynist because although it is a tale of dominance and submission it is the submission of the boys Conan and Roger to a slightly older but much more upper class female. It is also, within literary fiction of its time, the most descriptive portrayal of the pornographic trope of named males being dominated by a clothed female that I have read.
Sarban goes to goes to great trouble to ensure we know the boys swim naked to the island, leaving their clothes behind, and are naked while exploring it and when they meet a female, a huntress, she shoots arrows at the boys to establish control and dominance and is wearing a fitted hunting outfit. She shows them the island, has the boys explore a ruined building were they have to push through incredibly narrow opening and climb rocky walls (the images of these naked boys pushing through and against stone walls is belaboured) as she tells them tales of her life amongst the Indian tribes of South America and demands they perform a task for her (if they don't she won't tell them were she has hidden their clothes or allow them to return to the island). She constantly refers to their nakedness; how pale they are, her legs and arms are bare and very brown from the sun (again you can't help seeing a fetishizing of the boys paleness against the girls dark limbs even though parts of the boys bodies must have been tanned affter all the time they spent outdoors); and mentions that the south American indian boys she spent time with were more naked then they were (although the boys removed all their clothes before swimming out to the island we are told they made little loin clothes out of their handkerchiefs with bits of string*** which they continue to wear through the long day with the girl.
I won't relate the rest of the story, there are elements of the unknown or inexplicable, there is tension and suspense (and not over whether those handkerchiefs are going to remain in place) and a strong ending which explains all and explains nothing. Part of the mystery, in terms of whether anything is or is not explained at the end is wrapped up in class difference between the boys and the girl, she is the niece of the two elderly sisters who own the land and the lake and her upper class position, again emphasised in the way she speaks, received pronunciation, while the boys speak in a regional dialect/accent. In the same way the lower middle class background of the boys is central to the story. They come from families which have a place, a lowly one maybe, within the hierarchy of class system. The fact that they have bicycles and don't have to work would have been clear 'signifiers' to readers at the time. What it told readers was that these are not working class boys, who were always portrayed as rough, undisciplined and for being 'uppity' and not knowing their place or how to behave. The idea of two 'working class' boys naked with a 'young lady' would have had way to many threatening sexual overtones.
But equally the idea of two 'public school' boys being dominated by a female, even one of their class was unthinkable. By fifteen they were expected to behave like men, to know and accept their position and responsibilities, to prepare to run the empire, not go around naked and grovelling submissively before a female.
I must emphasise that this is not some complex textual reading - it is all there in black and white which brings me to my final comment on the bizarre way somethings were accepted for publication and others weren't. In 1952 Paul Bowles had to remove 'Pages From Coldpoint' and 'The Delicate Prey' from his short story collection before its UK publication and yet in 1955 James Purdy's '69 Dream Palace' was refused publication the USA it was published published in the UK. In between Sarban published this collection and it aroused no hostility or even comment. Whether any of this tells us anything I am not sure, but at the least it is instructive in reminding us that making easy claims about what was or was not acceptable/publishable/mentionable/known/unknown/talkedabout/hidden even in the recent past defies easy definitions.
*I am embarrassed mentioning price but there are way too many books I want to own and read and never enough money, or time!
**These stories were published in 1953 and are all set pre-WWII and if you are familiar with the writings of authors like M. R. James, Arthur Machen, Somerset Maugham or even writers like Saki or Conan Doyle you won't have any problem understanding the setting of Sarban's stories. But if you come to them without this then there are many things which will just seem very odd.
***Like a figleaf on a nude statue these loincloths draw attention to the boys nudity rather than hiding it and are more a sop to public prurience. Also a handkerchief and piece of string, even for those with DIY skills, is unlikely to survive swimming and physical activity or if it does provide any real concealment.
'A House of Call' is the shortest story in the collection, and in many ways the most conventional and displays what is good in Sarban's storytelling and what I find tiresome. It is a classic country house tale set at Christmas with a house full of people and as midnight approaches on Christmas Eve they tell ghost stories. Eventually the last story comes from, Mr. Beniston , a man recently retired from colonial service in India, who is more-or-less a stranger to everyone. He tells of being on long-leave ** and taking a motoring holiday along back roads and lanes, being forced to stop for the night on a dark and lonely unpaved road and seek shelter in an isolated farm and after retiring to bed there are events, only known through voices and sounds, which suggest the impossibly fantastic. The story displays all Sarban's strengths in creating atmosphere and conjuring a sense of malevolence and threat, within settings redolent of the weird, uncanny and unknown. He is also one of the numberless English writers who have a lyrical love and attachment to the countryside and find within it a home for unregenerate, dark even pagan forces such as Saki convey's so brilliantly in 'Gabriel Ernst' and 'The Music on the Hill'. It is not a conventional ghost tale a la M.R. James, more like a Robert Aickman story, but it does have the obsession with history, of the genus loci of place and how it echoes down from past to present of M.R. James or H.P. Lovecraft.
All these elements are present in the other two stories and, I believe, Sarban's other writings, but I now want to discuss what I don't like and, my first complaint is the idea of English countryside as containing a secret dark heart just waiting to burst forth. My problem is that I have never found any secret genus loci or malevolence waiting to be discovered in the English countryside. In fact I couldn't imagine it having one. As a little boy I encountered real, raw and mysterious nature in the Adirondack mountains and forest of upstate New York and later in the stark hard landscape of Dingle and Connacht in Ireland I fell in love with a land were the abandoned tiny, poor, fields and their ruined cottages left by famine victims and fleeing emigrants projected a sense of place, history and horror that reduced the England countryside to the twee and naff.
I must also mention that Sarban's language which at times makes my skin crawl with disgust and as an example I would mention his use of the word slatternly - it is typical word for the time and of a writer of his class. It is revoltingly pejorative and always accompanied by adjectival words about the woman and her clothes such as dirty, untidy, grubby, unclean, messy, torn, unmended. It is always used against poor women, women who have no husband, women who sexually available and invariably judgemental.
My other problem with Sarban is also my problem with James, Lovecraft, Aickman or any of the classic writers of horror - their sense of the monstrous is too domestic and safe. If the past echoes and haunts some lonely path in an English field what is it going to do at places such as Vélodrome d'Hiver in Paris, the fortress of Terezin in the Czech Republic, the National Stadium in Santiago de Chile and the Olympic Village in Sarajevo? They, and countless other places, would broadcast a memory of horror loud and dreadful enough to send anyone insane who came near them. As it is I doubt if many people under 60 would even recognise or remember what terrible things happened at them.
The other story, 'The Trespassers' is even more interesting both for what it says about Sarban and also about what subjects did and did not cause concern to publishers in 1953. The story is about two boys, Conan and Roger from a country town, 15 years old, they are sons of shopkeepers/clerks/tradesmen boys who would leave school at 16 and go into apprenticeships, they aren't working class, they respectable lower class and understanding the class position of a character in so much English fiction of this sort is essential and within this story in particular. School has finished for the summer and the boys spend their time exploring the countryside on their bicycles and they discover a hidden/empty/abandoned park (which means the lands and gardens attached to a country house) which they explore and find a lake with a island in the middle which they set out to explore.
The story has all Sarban's excellent sense of place and atmosphere but without the clunky historical elements of 'A House of Call' but before discussing the story further I must pause to discuss Sarban's writing in general. His writings, including this story and 'The Dollmaker', have a strong submission and dominance themes along with undertones S&M that has led some to claim that Sarban was a misogynist. I have not read enough of his work to draw a firm conclusion but 'The Trespassers' would suggest that Sarban was not simply a misogynist because although it is a tale of dominance and submission it is the submission of the boys Conan and Roger to a slightly older but much more upper class female. It is also, within literary fiction of its time, the most descriptive portrayal of the pornographic trope of named males being dominated by a clothed female that I have read.
Sarban goes to goes to great trouble to ensure we know the boys swim naked to the island, leaving their clothes behind, and are naked while exploring it and when they meet a female, a huntress, she shoots arrows at the boys to establish control and dominance and is wearing a fitted hunting outfit. She shows them the island, has the boys explore a ruined building were they have to push through incredibly narrow opening and climb rocky walls (the images of these naked boys pushing through and against stone walls is belaboured) as she tells them tales of her life amongst the Indian tribes of South America and demands they perform a task for her (if they don't she won't tell them were she has hidden their clothes or allow them to return to the island). She constantly refers to their nakedness; how pale they are, her legs and arms are bare and very brown from the sun (again you can't help seeing a fetishizing of the boys paleness against the girls dark limbs even though parts of the boys bodies must have been tanned affter all the time they spent outdoors); and mentions that the south American indian boys she spent time with were more naked then they were (although the boys removed all their clothes before swimming out to the island we are told they made little loin clothes out of their handkerchiefs with bits of string*** which they continue to wear through the long day with the girl.
I won't relate the rest of the story, there are elements of the unknown or inexplicable, there is tension and suspense (and not over whether those handkerchiefs are going to remain in place) and a strong ending which explains all and explains nothing. Part of the mystery, in terms of whether anything is or is not explained at the end is wrapped up in class difference between the boys and the girl, she is the niece of the two elderly sisters who own the land and the lake and her upper class position, again emphasised in the way she speaks, received pronunciation, while the boys speak in a regional dialect/accent. In the same way the lower middle class background of the boys is central to the story. They come from families which have a place, a lowly one maybe, within the hierarchy of class system. The fact that they have bicycles and don't have to work would have been clear 'signifiers' to readers at the time. What it told readers was that these are not working class boys, who were always portrayed as rough, undisciplined and for being 'uppity' and not knowing their place or how to behave. The idea of two 'working class' boys naked with a 'young lady' would have had way to many threatening sexual overtones.
But equally the idea of two 'public school' boys being dominated by a female, even one of their class was unthinkable. By fifteen they were expected to behave like men, to know and accept their position and responsibilities, to prepare to run the empire, not go around naked and grovelling submissively before a female.
I must emphasise that this is not some complex textual reading - it is all there in black and white which brings me to my final comment on the bizarre way somethings were accepted for publication and others weren't. In 1952 Paul Bowles had to remove 'Pages From Coldpoint' and 'The Delicate Prey' from his short story collection before its UK publication and yet in 1955 James Purdy's '69 Dream Palace' was refused publication the USA it was published published in the UK. In between Sarban published this collection and it aroused no hostility or even comment. Whether any of this tells us anything I am not sure, but at the least it is instructive in reminding us that making easy claims about what was or was not acceptable/publishable/mentionable/known/unknown/talkedabout/hidden even in the recent past defies easy definitions.
*I am embarrassed mentioning price but there are way too many books I want to own and read and never enough money, or time!
**These stories were published in 1953 and are all set pre-WWII and if you are familiar with the writings of authors like M. R. James, Arthur Machen, Somerset Maugham or even writers like Saki or Conan Doyle you won't have any problem understanding the setting of Sarban's stories. But if you come to them without this then there are many things which will just seem very odd.
***Like a figleaf on a nude statue these loincloths draw attention to the boys nudity rather than hiding it and are more a sop to public prurience. Also a handkerchief and piece of string, even for those with DIY skills, is unlikely to survive swimming and physical activity or if it does provide any real concealment.
November 4, 2023
Sarban's The Doll Maker (1953) is a psychologically sophisticated work, much more subtle than the pulp horror trappings its cover illustrations suggest, possessing a spare, understated quality comparable perhaps to Arthur Machen’s work, which the author cites as an influence.
I was impressed by the novel’s nuanced sense of space. Especially convincing is how it represents the lonesome emptiness that attends a boarding school between semesters, a sort of gnawing absence reflecting the protagonist's undefined, anxious uncertainty, perched on the threshold of adulthood and major life changes.
The exploration of the limits of mortality, identity, and desire that forms this work’s thematic and ideological core seems to reveal critical links with Sarban’s other major works, as if strange refractions of a singular vision.
I was impressed by the novel’s nuanced sense of space. Especially convincing is how it represents the lonesome emptiness that attends a boarding school between semesters, a sort of gnawing absence reflecting the protagonist's undefined, anxious uncertainty, perched on the threshold of adulthood and major life changes.
The exploration of the limits of mortality, identity, and desire that forms this work’s thematic and ideological core seems to reveal critical links with Sarban’s other major works, as if strange refractions of a singular vision.
March 25, 2021
A short book that feels like a long one. I slogged through probably ten pointlessly long paragraphs of description at several different points, paragraphs that could have been cut with no loss in the story, before I gave up with this book. Apparently the ending is anticlimactic as well. I wasn’t a fan of Sarban’s first novel either. Anyone who goes by a one-name pseudonym is a little suspect anyway...
August 13, 2020
My husband and I read this book by mistake to prepare for a book club meeting up in Elk Rapids.
The book is a slow-moving sinister tale of bored girls -- one in particular -- in a private boarding school who become enamored with a reclusive, yet worldly young man who lives in a mansion next door with his mother. This gothic-like horror tale is very puppet-master-like. You keep waiting for the young girl to 'snap out of it.' And at the end, it's hard to tell which way it's really going to go. This book is out of print.
And boy, were we disappointed when we found out we'd read the wrong 'Dollmaker.'
The book is a slow-moving sinister tale of bored girls -- one in particular -- in a private boarding school who become enamored with a reclusive, yet worldly young man who lives in a mansion next door with his mother. This gothic-like horror tale is very puppet-master-like. You keep waiting for the young girl to 'snap out of it.' And at the end, it's hard to tell which way it's really going to go. This book is out of print.
And boy, were we disappointed when we found out we'd read the wrong 'Dollmaker.'
May 30, 2021
Fair warning, I really liked this book, enchanting, very creative with some very cool and memorable feminine characters, but the storytelling feels quite dated. The book was written in the 50s and you can tell. But the vibrant description, the oozing athmosphere and the surprisingly modern characters make it a really nice read if you enjoy this sort of things.
July 4, 2021
The most intriguing, mysteriously poignant novel by Sarban I have read.
Delicately but beautifully written story that carefully unveils its thematic implications while sublimely horrifying the reader with nice little touches of eerie undertones.
Exquisitely original.
Delicately but beautifully written story that carefully unveils its thematic implications while sublimely horrifying the reader with nice little touches of eerie undertones.
Exquisitely original.
June 7, 2019
Delightfully creepy, and a slow, subtle burn despite its small size.
August 21, 2021
Interesting plot. Not may favorite in pacing
May 5, 2022
Thoroughly enjoyed this. I was conscious when it was written and the genre so any criticism I'd normally have in this day and age i put to one side and went for the ride.
June 4, 2024
18 year old Clare finds herself at a boarding school when a chance encounter leads her to meet the older and mysterious landowner, Niall. She soon becomes completely enthralled by him and it could be that the feelings are returned.. there’s just one little thing; Niall makes lifelike dolls that might just be a little more than they seem.
Not bad for a book I tracked down on a whole after reading a review of it in Undertow Publications’ magazine. If you have a taste for the more ambiguous gothics, you might want try to get your hands on this. It’s made all the more interesting by how private the author preferred to stay.
Not bad for a book I tracked down on a whole after reading a review of it in Undertow Publications’ magazine. If you have a taste for the more ambiguous gothics, you might want try to get your hands on this. It’s made all the more interesting by how private the author preferred to stay.
November 19, 2010
This is one of the creepiest books I have read in a long time; and a perfect setting to me, set in 1940's or 50's (not sure which) England at a girls' boarding school. It took my heart about a half hour to go back to it's normal beat after finishing the last 20 pages.
May 4, 2014
Ugh. I love reading sad books like this.
September 21, 2015
Wow quite the story !
December 5, 2016
3 1/2 stars. Incredibly readable, though it dragged in places.
April 24, 2018
So my library's Overdrive randomly had this audiobook. It's a strange tale and very of its time. It's definitely worth reading if your local library has it too!
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews