Promotional materials for “Dollface” welcome this novel into a subgenre I did not even know existed: slasher novels by women for women readers. I knew about slasher films, but not about slasher novels. So I did a little research. First, there were horror films, scary and violent. “Psycho” and “The Exorcist,” for example, are horror films.
Slashers, a subset, have slightly different rules. The killer must be human—not an android or computer. The killer usually walks among us looking normal most of the time but in fact suffers from a severe childhood trauma, which has damaged him a lot! The classic slasher movies are “Halloween,” “Friday the Thirteenth,” “I Know What You Did Last Summer,” “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” (no kidding!) and “Scream.”
The early slasher novels were modelled on these but then, publishers thought, why not make it a female genre? The victims had been mostly women all along, often a group of young women, sometimes in an isolated rural or island setting and they are killed grotesquely, one at a time. In fact, the trope calls for a “last girl,” the sole survivor, hunted down last.
In the opening scene of “Dollface,” young Jill watches as her seriously mentally ill mother sits on the floor of her walk-in closet, grotesquely, wildly, applies makeup—lipstick, blusher, eye shadow, mascara—all over her face and then slashes herself to death with fragments of her vanity mirror.
We next see Jill in the present as she moves into her new home in northern New Jersey. Her husband, a Coast Guard officer, has been stationed in NYC. He will be away all day, long commute. Jill will be home with her 8-year-old young son, writing. Believe it or not, Jill has become a horror novelist, totally knowledgeable about the patterns and tropes of the genre.
She meets Darcy, her mild-mannered next-door neighbor, who insists Jill join the local PTA. She reluctantly agrees. This neighbor has a kind of AMWAY business venture, selling “Dollface” makeup. Jill has an understandable aversion to make-up, uses very little.
Well, before long, the officers of the PTA begin to be murdered, not by poison or strangulation, naturally, but in varied, violent, cruel, creative ways, in their homes, at the school, and so on, by a killer wearing a doll-face mask and employing different household and garden tools.
The tools are not quick or efficient. There are buckets of blood, and Jill, who is an expert, of course realizes she is in the plot of a slasher novel and she is “last girl.” I am not at all squeamish, and I have to assume neither are the thousands of women who read these bloody novels.
