Smothered Dolls
{4.5/5} “‘This place, this loft… well, back in the seventies, it belonged to her.’ The unexpected verbal italics did more than jangle rudely in my ears… they formed shivery small scythes, which arced cleanly through the haze of my thoughts, revealing something best left hidden — before I spoke, I carefully ran my tongue over my espresso-fuzzed front teeth, wishing I could so easily clean away the knowledge which now seeped across the inner screen of my mind.” (from “Milan, March 1972”)
Smothered Dolls by A. R. Morlan, published in 2007
“Smothered Dolls or The Girl Who Could Never Be Good” — The girl’s Mother and GrandMother were always telling her she was bad. When she got dolls they put plastic bags around the heads so she wouldn’t mess up their hair. She thought that she must be bad, until the dolls started talking to her, giving her another perspective.
It’s about how your own family can be terrible people.
“The German Lady” — Ashley works for a cleaning service to make money for college when she meets Mrs. Rusalka. Mrs. Rusalka doesn’t need much cleaning done as she doesn’t make much of a mess, but they spend some time talking. Mrs. Rusalka’s husband has died — they came here from Germany after the war — and she has an old house and a bit of forested area.
It’s about a person who has an unexpected connection to the forest.
Two of the stories in this book we published in Challenging Destiny. In fact, Morlan was the second-most prolific author within its pages. The novellette “The Gemütlichkeit Escape” is the standout here — an astonishing story that gives you some sympathy for a man in charge of a POW camp.
It’s filled with small-town characters who live in a world that’s just like ours except for one fantastic thing. Some of the darker stories have characters who are murderers or obsessed artists.
Some of the stories are written in the style that she developed where she has a lot of long, almost run-on, sentences — like the quotation at the top. Regardless of what style she’s writing in, she always has a way of describing the world in piercing detail.
She only wrote a couple of novels but she wrote over 100 short stories, some of which have been collected in a few collections. This was her 1st collection.
Morlan wrote afterwards for each story. The horror of her real life is a startling theme. She had an extremely difficult upbringing, and the source of that difficulty is shown here — the first, title story is the essentially true story of how her mother and grandmother treated her like dirt. She decided to never have children, so that their genes would not be passed on.
Despite some of the stories being disturbing, what you’d categorize as horror, I’m glad I read it — I feel like I know her a bit better.
This is the 1st book by Morlan I’ve read.