The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror is a collection of short fiction by Joyce Carol Oates published in 2016 by the Mysterious Press.
The volume received the 2016 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Fiction Collection. "Big Mamma" received the Thriller Award in 2017 from International Thriller Writers (ITW) for Best Short Story.
"Gun Accident: An Investigation" won the ITW Best Story Award in 2016, as well as the Year's Best Crime and Mystery Stories, 2016.
Stories Periodical or book of original publication are indicated.Oates, 2012: Acknowledgments
"The Doll-Master" (The Doll Collection ed. Ellen Datlow, Tor Books 2015) "Soldier" (Idaho Review, 2015) "Gun Accident: An Investigation" (Ellery Queen's, July 2015) "Equatorial" (Ellery Queen's, December 2014) "Big Momma" (Ellery Queen's, March/April 2016) "Mystery, Inc." (Mysterious Bookshop Bibliomystery series, 2015)
Reception New York Times literary critic Terrence Rafferty reports that the stories in The Doll-Master suggest a decline in Oates's powers as a writer of horror fiction. Rafferty cites her 1966 "classic tale of horror" "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" as evidence: "It is, in its chillingly objective way, scarier than anything in Oates's new collection."Rafferty, 2016: "Oates's brand of horror has never required the invocation of other worlds: This world is terrible enough for her."
Literary critic Erik K. Anderson at Lonesome Reader Blog reminds readers that Oates acknowledges her debt to American writers of Gothic literature-Horror literature, among these Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and H. P. Lovecraft. Praising the stories as "adeptly-realized," Anderson writes:
Footnotes
Sources Anderson, Eric K. 2016. Review of Joyce Carol Oates's The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror In Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies. Vol. 3, Article 3. University of San Francisco. Accessed 9 March 2025. Oates, Joyce Carol. 2012. The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror Mysterious Press, New York. Rafferty, Terrence. 2016. Horror: Joyce Carol Oates's 'The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror,' and More The New York Times, June 1, 2016. Accessed 10 March 2025.