She’s a Doll

On the top shelf of a cluttered sewing room sit four porcelain dolls: a cowgirl, a ballerina, a schoolteacher and a bride. They are the last thing Lucy McQuinn sees as the air goes out of her, and in the instant after death, when a spirit can grab hold of whatever is nearest, she picks the bride. She admits later that the cowgirl, with her jeans and lasso, would have been the practical choice. She’s a Doll by Barbara Truelove is built on that joke and on the grief underneath it, and it turns out to be a far sturdier horror comedy than its premise has any right to be.

How It Works

Lucy is twenty, broke, raised by her grandmother in a small Australian town, and has just been emailed a certificate in business administration. The evening it arrives, she rings her best friend, Krissy, and Krissy’s twin brother Kyle answers instead. A few hours later he is at her door with a bottle of vodka. The murder is not a mystery; the novel tells you who did it on page one. What it asks is what a dead girl can do about it from inside a toy.

The answer arrives as a set of numbered “Ghost Lore Facts” that Lucy amends as she goes, which is the book’s neatest device:

• Anger is the fuel. She can only move when she is furious. Her first act as a doll is crushing a moth that has started eating her stuffing.
• Time is unreliable. Grief makes days blur past in a smear; panic can freeze a room. With practice she learns to slow the flow herself, at a cost.
• She has no voice. The one exception is Nicola, a former schoolmate now working at a thrift shop, whose hearing aid somehow picks Lucy up.
• She possesses the idea of the doll, not its parts. Glue on a stick for an arm and it becomes her arm, which matters when her body starts falling apart.

The structure of She’s a Doll by Barbara Truelove follows those rules out. Every new limb, vehicle or skill unlocks a new move, and Lucy, a lifelong gamer, narrates it as if she were levelling up a deliberately weak character build.

Why She’s a Doll Plays Its Jokes Straight

What the structure is really doing is giving grief a physical shape. Lucy cannot cry, cannot breathe and cannot be heard, so every emotion has to be converted into movement or held inside a painted smile. When Nicola rebuilds her with a glue gun, duct tape and Bubble Wrap, the slapstick is genuinely funny, and it is also a scene about being touched after violence, and the novel lets both readings stand.

The other engine is the argument between the two women. Lucy wants Kyle dead. Nicola, who has her own reasons to fear him, wants him exposed and in prison, and their compromise, a campaign of anonymous haunting with whiteboard plans and spray paint, gives She’s a Doll by Barbara Truelove its caper middle. The question of whether revenge or justice is the better ending stays open almost to the last page.

What works

• The voice. Lucy is profane, nerdy, self-mocking and very Australian, with riffs on classic novels, video games and old horror films. Her jokes are a coping mechanism, and she knows it.
• The rebuild. Her doll body is a running visual gag: one eye, tufted hair, a pirate lurch, and later a remote-control car she drives with skills learned on a second-hand PlayStation.
• Nicola. Cynical, funny, frightened and fiercely loyal, she is the brains and the working hands of the operation, and the friendship is the book’s real love story.
• The frame. An in-world note before chapter one warns that the narrator lies about small things. Read everything, including the pages after the acknowledgments.

Where She’s a Doll Gives Ground

• The quarrels loop. Through the middle stretch of She’s a Doll by Barbara Truelove, Lucy and Nicola fight, apologise and reconcile several times in very similar shapes. The beats are honest but they repeat.
• The climax runs on luck. The final confrontation depends on a target behaving exactly as needed and on equipment being conveniently to hand. The book half explains this away, but it still feels engineered on first reading.
• The town barely investigates. Police and neighbours are thin. A subplot about another woman Kyle hurt builds promisingly and then settles for a line.
• The ending is summarised. After a tight, nasty climax, the fallout arrives as reported gossip and social media updates rather than scenes.

Read These Next

If She’s a Doll by Barbara Truelove leaves you wanting more ghosts with a grudge and a sense of humour, try these:

1. Of Monsters and Mainframes by Barbara Truelove, her spaceship-meets-Dracula novel, with the same knack for a lovable inhuman narrator.
2. The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix, survivors of violent men deciding they are done being victims.
3. Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders, ghosts who refuse to leave, for a reader who wants the literary end of the shelf.
4. Coraline by Neil Gaiman, the definitive story of a girl, a house and something wrong with the dolls’ eyes.
5. How to Sell a Haunted House by Grady Hendrix, a family grief novel with a terrifying puppet at its heart.

Browse more seasonal picks on our Halloween horror shelf.

About Barbara Truelove

Barbara Truelove is an Australian writer based in New South Wales, born in the early 1990s, who has worked as a television production assistant, a hotel receptionist and a kindergarten teacher. She’s a Doll by Barbara Truelove is her second novel with Ezeekat Press, the reader-curated imprint at Bindery Books, and it was published in paperback and ebook on 8 September 2026, so it is out now.

• Her previous novel, Of Monsters and Mainframes (2025), drew starred trade reviews and is narrated by the computer of a starship called Demeter
• She also writes interactive fiction: Blood Moon, a werewolf-and-vampire game, was released by Hosted Games in 2023
• A novella, The Secret Lives of Zombie Wives, is announced from Tor Nightfire for February 2027
• Lucy calls herself a poltergeist early on, and the book treats the old folklore of noisy, object-throwing ghosts with real affection

What Stays With You

Not the climax, oddly, though it is properly nasty. What lingers is a broken doll sitting on a sofa beside a woman who should be terrified of her, watching zombie television and feeling, for the first time since she died, almost normal. She’s a Doll by Barbara Truelove circles too much in its middle and leans on luck at the end, but its heart and its jokes are both the real thing.

Mind which doll you leave on the top shelf.