Horror and Fear

The author incorporates tropes from the horror genre to explore perceptions of fear and the specter of death. In “The Doll,” a group of children find the doll of a neighbor, Caitlin Mullen, who has recently died. The deaths of the Mullen family — the three children and their mother from carbon monoxide poisoning and the father by suicide shortly thereafter — introduce the prospect of mortality in a way they have never had to reckon with before. As the narrator, Matt, remarks, “I was one kind of ghoul: a boy to whom nothing bad had happened, all suffering unreal as comic book gore” (100). The children take turns bringing the doll home, and in each case something frightening and inexplicable happens. For instance, when Olivia places the doll on a shelf, she wakes to find that it has switched places with her own doll and it...