by Megan Stoddard

Created on: November 29, 2010

Ruth Rendell’s novel “The Killing Doll” is a psychological thriller in the truest sense. Two characters are clearly insane but believe themselves fully rational. Other characters may not meet psychiatric criteria for insanity, but they, too, operate on faulty assumptions without having an entirely clear picture of the world. Rendell is a master at bringing the reader inside the minds of all kinds of characters, and at drawing out their thoughts and motives.

The central characters are a brother and sister, Pup (real name Peter) and Dolly (real name Doreen). They are very close. Dolly takes it upon herself to be Pup’s second mother when their own mother dies, though he is a teenager at the time and she in her early twenties.

Because one side of her face is covered by a birthmark, Dolly perceives herself as ugly and isolates herself from the world. With no hope of ever marrying, no education beyond secondary school, no career plans, and no friends, she spends her days keeping house for her brother and widowed father and earning a little money as a seamstress working from home. She drinks increasing amounts of wine every day, sliding seamlessly into alcoholism.

At the age of sixteen, Pup takes an interest in magic. Reading up on the Golden Dawn, Kabbalah, and all things occult, Pup begins to call himself a magician. He turns an unused room in the family’s big house into a temple, setting up altars and painting occult symbols in it. When he ritually sells his soul to the devil, the reader can easily believe, as Pup himself comes to, that it is nothing more than a childish game. Nothing supernatural happens.

The only person Pup confides his interest in magic to is his sister, Dolly. He invites her into the temple to witness his rituals. Taken with the idea that her brother is a great magician, Dolly soon develops an occult interest of her own. She begins attending seances conducted by a well known medium. Pup, meanwhile, finishes school, goes to work in his father’s business, discovers women, and loses interest in magic.

When their father remarries, to a woman not much older than his children, Pup and Dolly have good reason to be resentful. The first thing their new “stepmother” does is make them move to the mostly unused third floor, leaving most of the house to herself and their father. Feeling less welcome in her own home, Dolly turns her sewing talent to the making of dolls. While she sells most of them as collectibles or children’s playthings, the first doll she makes is a likeness of her father’s wife, intending to use it for black magic.

Believing Pup to be a great magician, though he has, unbeknownst to her, stopped believing in magic, Dolly asks for his help in a ritual to curse their father’s wife. The consequences are deadly... but are they the result of the magic, or is the explanation for what happens purely rational? Dolly believes it is the magic. Everyone else, including Pup, sees the rational explanation. From the reader’s perspective, either could be equally true.

Meanwhile, the story of a young man with an increasingly unbalanced mind runs parallel to the story of Dolly and Pup. His path crosses theirs only briefly. How he relates to the main plot remains a mystery until the very end.

Though parts of “The Killing Doll” may be too predictable, the overall story is a masterpiece. What is especially well done is the portrayal of each character slipping into insanity in their own way. By the end, it is unclear, probably intentionally so, whether what is happening is mundane, supernatural, both, or neither.

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