2025
This month in Rue Morgue Magazine, you can find my piece “An Uncanny Coterie: Confessions of a Doll Collector,” a love letter to all the creepy porcelain beauties that horror movies have trained us to fear. Those sweet-faced antique dolls with their fixed gazes and milk-white complexions, originally designed as childhood perfection but now possessed of the calculating malice of porcelain predators in pretty dresses.
It’s really just me confessing my love for the very objects that make other people cross themselves and back away slowly. My shelves are lined with eyeless porcelain ladies and babies clutching invisible rattles (or knives?), and I find beauty in what Francis Bacon called “some strangeness in the proportion.”
From childhood memories of periwinkle-dressed beauties to my current coterie of perfect, precious potential assassins, this is my meditation on embracing what makes others uncomfortable. Which has a real “I’m not like other girls, I like dark things” energy, ugh. I guess what I mean is I’m curious about the psychology of collecting things that make most people’s skin crawl; why some of us are magnetically pulled toward the very things that give us the creeps. Grab a copy when it’s on stands next week if you want to read about finding charm in what others consider cursed!
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Deborah says
I have a Bubbles doll and my first baby doll, which was Tiny Tears. I've collected dolls since I was little, so have a nice collection that's now antique since I am.
I never found dolls creepy. Just my grandma's Styrofoam wig stand that sat on her dresser. When I slept overnight in her bedroom, I could see the wig stand in the dark shadows from the bed. It was scary. One night, I woke up and it was talking to me. I hated that thing.