Abstract
The animate doll is a firm fixture of the horror genre; from the infamous homicidal Chucky, to recent incarnations of troubled toy narratives including Annabelle and The Boy, in horror cinema, talking dolls are now commonplace. Similarly, these totemic miniature humans populate horror literature. Writers continue to capitalize on their eerie nature, creating narratives which transgress bodily borders, where troubled toys come to life. These literary “living” doll narratives have received scant critical attention in comparison to their visual counterparts. With this in mind, this chapter considers the animate doll’s place in contemporary horror fiction by providing an overview of their position in the genre more widely and through close analysis of one key text: Ramsey Campbell’s The Doll Who Ate His Mother.
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Mills, S. (2018). Discussing Dolls: Horror and the Human Double. In: Corstorphine, K., Kremmel, L. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook to Horror Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97406-4_19
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97406-4_19
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