The Town of Whispering Dolls

“What beauties these stories are. Susan Neville has an imagination not only rich and strange but also very much a moral imagination. How gentle and shocking is her view of what humans have done, and what a find this book is.”
—Joan Silber, author of Improvement
 

"In Neville's bracing collection (after In the House of Blue Lights), residents of an unnamed Midwestern rust belt town develop unsettling relationships with dolls. In 'Here,' an older woman who's seen her town ravaged by factory automation and deaths from opioid addiction, describes the appearance of 'a plague of dolls,' humanlike and human-size figures who enter abandoned houses, filling the space of those who have left or died. In 'Resurrection,' one of the strongest stories, elementary school students assigned to take care of egg babies build homes for them in boxes with families peopled by paper dolls and toys from fast food restaurants. Their play-acting becomes eerily realistic when the students begin to worry about their egg children dying; one student opens a hospital for injured eggs and finds herself overwhelmed with patients—eggs, dolls, and the students themselves." —Publishers Weekly


 

“These stories are gems. Neville’s prose feels sourced from poetry, with its deft metaphors and fleet movement between the real and surreal, leaving the reader in a kind of dream landscape, recognizable yet askew, replete with the chilly thrill of inhabiting a new world. This foreign yet familiar place is the so-called flyover country, our country’s heartland, and at a time of decline, of abandonment, of aging, of death. The voices in these stories are eloquent and profound, personal and national, serving as a chorus, singing the complex song of loss and praise, the elegy.” —Antonya Nelson, author of Funny Once: Stories and Bound: A Novel