- Paperback: 272 pages
- Publisher: Arrow; New edition edition (2 Mar 1995)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0099399504
- ISBN-13: 978-0099399506
- Product Dimensions: 17.6 x 11 x 2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 164,968 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
The Killing Doll
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Product Description
Book Description
An intense and disturbing novel from the UK's most loved crime writer
Product Description
The winter before he was sixteen, Pup sold his soul to the devil. He wasn't quite sure what he was going to get in exchange. For the time being, all he asked for was to be happy, and to grow a bit taller. Even though she was older than Pup, Dolly was always in awe of her brother. More and more, she wanted to believe that he had occult powers and could do anything. Magic could remove the birthmark from her face and make her normal. Magic could kill their wicked stepmother, Myra. Pup laughs when Dolly shows him an effigy of Myra: a rag doll, about fifteen inches high, with knitted nylon skin and rust-coloured wool hair. Dolly sticks it full of pins. Myra dies. With dazzling virtuosity Ruth Rendell explores a haunted world of obsession, delusions and murderous fantasy. (20030723)
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
It's quite hard to do a summary of this novel. As with all the best Ruth Rendell it conveys a very strong atmosphere of its own, of lonely, maladjusted people living lives alienated from mainstream society, and an awful lot of plot is packed into its 236 pages. On the minus side it can feel very disjointed at times. There is little sense of time in the whole book, and years go past in the twinkling of an eye, which can make you feel uninvolved. It's like watching a very weird soap opera on Fast Forward! At the centre of the story is Dolly, a young woman who feels removed from society because of a large birth-mark on her face. She ekes out a living doing dressmaking for friends and neighbours, she is a borderline alcoholic, and the centre of her whole lonely existence is her younger brother Peter (known as Pup) whom she adores to distraction.
Dolly believes that Peter is a master magician, who can solve all people's problems using spells, and even make people die or disappear. The truth is that Peter went through an adolescent phase of toying with magic, but lost interest when he discovered the charms of the opposite sex instead, (Peter has a neat line in chat-ups, he tells every woman he fancies that he is still a virgin and they must show him the ropes!). They live with their father, a widower, who spends most of his time reading historical novels. Although somehow he seems to come out of his books long enough to marry a much younger woman, Myra, who is on the rebound from an affair with a married man. It is Myra moving into the house, and disturbing their cosy set-up, that prompts Dolly to press Peter for her removal, a sort of assassination-by-magic. Also living in the neighbourhood is a young Irishman, Diarmit, who was left severely traumatised by an IRA bombing, and who is finding it increasingly hard to hang onto his own fragile identity. Things start to get decidedly worrying when he takes to carrying a little collection of knives around with him in an old Harrods bag, and hanging about down by the railway line.
If all this sounds a wee bit odd, well that's because it is. It doesn't stop it being very readable, although I found Dolly's constant sighting of "ghosts" tedious and annoying (this is an irritating plot-device, which the author was to use again many years later in "Adam And Eve And Pinch Me", and I do wish she would stop it!). Fans of Ruth Rendell, like myself, will find this a memorable book, but I wouldn't say it was one of her best.
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This has got to be one of Ruth Rendell's strangest books. All the characters are just plain weird. The writing is brilliant, and the psychologically unbalanced cahracters are drawn with an ease and assurance that makes the act of reading about them somewhat disturbing. The climax is completley unexpected, and it is in true Rendell fashion. This is one not to be missed. One of her very best books.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
7 reviews
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful
Ruth Rendell is truly amazing
30 Nov 2003
Format:Hardcover
Ruth Rendell has written so many novels that publishers have a job keeping them all in print, all readily available, and normally they fail dismally, meaning that only the most recent novels are available, and older, equally brilliant little gems, are only eclectically available to readers, and thus people frequently miss out on the author's entire marvellous cannon. The problem is that if even one novel by Rendell remains out of print, readers are missing a unique and unequalable reading experience. The Killing Doll is just such a case - an absolutely unique book among her body of work, yet it retains all the factors which conspire to make each novel brilliant. Psychology, irony, chill, skin-crawling reality, brilliant characters, brilliant plots and shocking twists, etc etc etc.
The Killing Doll is a relatively hard novel to pin down. Most of Rendell's novels outside the Wexford series tend to be. This one is, on the one hand, a book about the Faustian pact of young Peter Yearman who sells his soul to grow taller, and soon becomes drawn, along with his adoring older sister Dolly, into the world of the occult. However, as Peter grows up he turns away from the magick he once believed in, and goes out into the real world. Unfortunately, Dolly - shy and friendless, nervous of going outside of the house due to a large birthmark on her cheek - cannot separate herself from it - she still believes his seeming powers are genuine. As events conspire to tip her further over the edge - from very early on it is clear that isolated Dolly, who talks to her dead mother and comes to make dolls representative of those she hopes Peter's magic will harm, is a little Schizophrenic - the novel from then on dwells in the very dark places of madness, as all the characters move along happily with their dangerous delusions, until the final catastrophic chapters in which all the events are brought to a shattering climax.
I adore her books. I have a passion and thirst for them which will not be slaked, and I defy anyone to deny that she is not one of the best novelists writing today. Fine, I have no problem with people disliking her books (after all, some people of course won't like keeping company with strange, slightly warped characters who tang with a disturbing, uncomfortable reality) if they find the things they cover slightly disturbing, but anyone should at least be able to admit the incredible quality which lies at the core, whether they like the subject matter or not. It is quality that sings to me, sings to me of damaged people and twisted things, terrible worlds of Shakespearean irony (the tradition of the great Tragedy is alive and well in Rendell's novels) , and lives lived at risk from those around us who need just a subtle trigger to send them to madness. She is an insightful, clever and diabolically vicious writer who never shies away from showing us a different side of life, and The Killing Doll is another work of genius.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Ruth Rendell Rules!
8 July 2001
Format:Hardcover
I have been on a Ruth Rendell kick lately, the last five novels read have been hers. The first, and still favorite was "A Sight for Sore Eyes", but "The Killing Doll comes in a close 2nd. This book centers around a young woman named Dolly who is quite an introvert due to the huge disfiguring birthmark on her face. She stays in her house for the most part and does sewing for the neighbors to make money. After her mother dies, Dolly becomes the mother figure to her younger brother, Pup who, as a teenager, sells his soul to the devil in order to grow taller. This leads to a fascination with the occult and Dolly is soon his biggest supporter, urging him to conjure up spirits and get rid of the people she feels are ruining her life, such as her new stepmother. Pup humors her and after performing some rituals, the stepmother does indeed die. Dolly begins to lose touch with reality and plunges deeper into the occult, while Pup is losing interest in it. The story shows how disturbed Dolly becomes and how her fate entwines with another disturbed young man. As usual, Ruth Rendell writes a real page turner with a style all her own.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
One of Her Best
14 Feb 2001
Format:Hardcover
I think Ruth Rendell is the best suspense writer living. If you have never read one of her books before, then prepare to be enthralled by her characters, her plot and by the fierce intelligence evident in her writing. I have read everything she has ever written and "The Killing Doll" is perhaps her finest work. This is not a nice, neat, cosy stereotypical English mystery. It is a story about disturbed and disturbing people who act out of desperation, loneliness and fear. You will feel pity for some of her characters and loathing for others. Their stories will remain with you long after you turn the final page.
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