Spotlight: Dollface by 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.

Excerpt

Someone once said that a mirror is a girl’s best friend.

Someone lied.

Fourteen wrinkles. Sixteen, if I count the creases where my dimples used to be, the cute, pinprick divots now reduced to thin cracks running in parallel lines on either side of my mouth. I count them, of course, because what fun would criticizing my flaws be if I didn’t throw in some math, too?

My stomach clenches. Even when I pick myself apart, I can’t help but go the extra mile. Two birds, one stone—or whatever that saying is. My darling husband glares at me every time I use it. It’s been nearly twenty years since Rob and I met while interning at PETA, but we still do our best to avoid meat, dairy, and cruel animal idioms.

Maybe that’s the problem? The caverns under my eyes, the dark half-moons, persist whether I sleep four hours or eight. Maybe I need more collagen in my diet.

A voice buzzes against my ear as the phone grows warm in my hand. I set it on the soapstone countertop and push in AirPods. Half a second later, Bluetooth resumes. “And then somewhere in the northern Mojave,” the voice in my ears says, “we came across these incredible hot springs. I just stripped down naked and—”

My body pressed against the edge of the vanity, my breath fogs the mirror as I lean in to scrutinize my former dimples under the bathroom microscope. Bathrooms: a nicer way of saying private, personal hells. Who needs fire and brimstone when you have recessed fluorescents and a full-length mirror? This might be the master bathroom, but we both know who is in charge.

“You should have seen it,” her voice goes on, “an oasis in the middle of the desert. It was the perfect setting for inspiration—like, it’s perfectly safe and beautiful, but could turn spooky in a heartbeat. That’s the best kind of scary, right? Like, when it’s not supposed to be?”

The voice becomes tinnitus as I wipe my breath-fog away.

It’s not just the dimples.

My lips aren’t totally recognizable anymore either. These, too, have begun to wilt, the slabs pale and ringed with withered edges, like peach skin sucking itself dry around uneaten fruit. My nose seems steeper. Eyelashes, thinner. My skin appears ashen under the bright lights, and a concerning amount of what I hope is not jowl trims the underside of my jaw. A fold runs diagonally down the length of my cheek from where flesh pressed against bedsheets all night.

Heeere’s Johnny! My reflection flinches when Jack Torrance’s maniacal grin shines back at me in the bathroom mirror. Forget Shelley Duvall. In the oversize horror-movie T-shirt and sleep-swept inkblot hair, I look like the Bride of freakin’ Frankenstein.

A yawn slips out and my reflection grimaces at the quick peek of double chin. I feel like the Bride of freakin’ Frankenstein.

I want to scream with her, rage against this monstrous shell I find myself looking out of. But if I do, Tanner will wake and come running, Lugosi hot on his heels. The retriever I wouldn’t mind, but the few moments of quiet I get in the morning before my eight-year-old erupts from his bed?

Those are precious.

“And then we rappelled down this limestone—” The words pinch off when the bud ejects itself from my ear. I push it back and screw it against the side of my face like a bolt on a monster’s neck. I miss the rest of her sentence, but that’s okay.

Downstairs, among a sea of moving boxes I’ve yet to unpack, Tanner’s third-grade school supplies lurk in disorganized piles—colored folders with pockets (no brads), No. 2 pencils (pre-sharpened), glossy yellow card-stock packages with rainbows of crayons, colored pencils, and markers (washable and nontoxic). Spirals (wide ruled). Glue sticks (four). I managed to find my laptop charger and a box of hardcovers I’m supposed to sign for some bookstore in the Midwest, but I still haven’t unearthed the box that contains my son’s lucky green vinyl lunch box with the broken zipper. Stacks of New Student paperwork await completion on the kitchen countertop, and our dog smells like road trip.

I think my husband got misplaced in the move.

I haven’t touched my manuscript in over a week.

The details change but the headache doesn’t. We’ve done this exact same thing twice in the past ten years. Doesn’t matter that Rob’s command in the Coast Guard is Department of Homeland Security and not Defense, there’ll be no permanent home base for this military family. It gets harder, not easier, the effort of uprooting and reestablishing our household tangled with both the constant ache in my upper back and the road map winding across my forehead.

And that’s probably that’s why I became an author. A girl needs more than her child and partner. Books make it easier not to feel lonely, even if all your closest girlfriends are fictional.

I close my eyes and scream on the inside, long and hard and raspy just like the poor Bride. Then I let out a deep sigh and blink my eyes open.

So, sixteen wrinkles then. Sixteen seams weave across my face, like if I shake too hard, my skin might split apart. One thick, wet schlorp and all my stuffing spills out. Bride of Frankenstein, I can handle, just please, please, don’t let me turn into my mother.

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About the Author

Lindy Ryan is an award-winning author, anthologist, and short-film director whose books and anthologies have received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Booklist and Library Journal. Several of her projects have been adapted for screen. Ryan is the current author-in-residence at Rue Morgue. Declared a “champion for women’s voices in horror” by Shelf Awareness, Ryan was named a Publishers Weekly Star Watch Honoree in 2020, and in 2022, was named one of horror's most masterful anthology curators. ​Born and raised in Southeast Texas, Ryan currently resides on the East Coast.​​​ She is a professor at Rutgers University.