Publication Date: February 24, 2026
Barbie meets Scream with a 90s nostalgia twist in this horror romp from Bless Your Heart author Lindy Ryan.
Horror author Jill has just moved to suburban New Jersey, hoping to fit in with the new PTA moms and maybe not weird everyone out with her Final Girl coffee mug. You know. Make some real friends.
But then a plastic face-masked serial killer begins slashing their way through town, one overly made-up mom at a time. The police are incredulous. The moms are indignant. And Jill is slowly wrapped into a killer’s murderous spree, until she might just be the last woman standing.
A delightfully murderous novel that is equal parts scathing and salacious, Dollface will win you over with its gossip and gore, one body at a time.
A doll-faced killer stalks a group of PTA moms in a suburban New Jersey neighborhood in Lindy Ryan’s delightful made-for-cinema romp, Dollface.
Horror author Jill Marshall, her husband, Rob, and their son, Tanner, have just moved into their new house in leafy Brunswick, New Jersey. Fresh from a cross-country move from the Pacific Northwest to Rob’s new Coast Guard assignment in nearby New York, Jill is not prepared for the neighbor who comes bearing a massive gift basket the day after their arrival. After all, the house is a landmine of unpacked moving boxes, her eight-year-old son needs school supplies, her sister Kitty in Portland is just needy, and Jill’s editor is pinging her phone incessantly for updates on her new manuscript. What’s a mom to do?
Darla Lashett is Jill’s opposite in every way: Jill wears retro horror movie t-shirts and hoodies, while Darla—pretty and plump with cheeks that remind Jill of “powdered doughnuts”— sports color-coordinated outfits and Keds. Over a cup of coffee in Jill’s new home, Darla reveals that she is president of the Brunswick Elementary School PTA, and that Patti—the woman who sold the house to the Marshalls—left a vacancy on the PTA board she hopes Jill will fill, as the new Cultural Arts person. Before she knows it, Jill is in Darla’s SUV and meeting with the rest of the PTA moms at the local coffee shop, The Dream Bean.
But later that night, a mean-spirited barista is murdered just outside the coffee shop, her neck gruesomely gashed. Over the coming weeks, Jill finds herself in the center of a mounting orgy of violence, as the PTA “mean moms” begin to drop like proverbial flies at the hands of a demented person donning a plastic doll-face mask. Will Jill be the final girl of her own genre?
Ryan spins an irreverent and deliciously diabolical story that is equally humorous and haunting. With multiple references to classic horror movies and novels of the 1980s and 90s, Ryan reveals her horror bona fides in Jill’s sassy character, but also deftly tackles serious issues like mental illness and suicide. The theme of cosmetics and makeup becomes a powerful metaphor for covering over trauma and psychic damage, especially in relation to both the doll-face mask and also in the way women around Jill cope with insecurities by superficial modes of dress and status-signifying conversation.
The story mostly unfolds from Jill’s first-person perspective, which is chatty and relatable, as she makes keen writer observations of the mundane terrors all around: “it’s the perfectly ordinary houses—the cute little redbricks with the picket fences and backyard pools—that play home to the true horrors.” Interspersed are the chilling and quite gory chapters of the doll-face killer in third-person action as they stalk the PTA board members one-by-one, doling out pain and impairment in viciously personal ways.
As Jill begins to home in on her new novel’s premise and the identity of the killer, she begins to see connections on her writer’s corkboard—worrying both her husband and sister that she may be losing herself to an all-too-familiar obsession. As she blandly notes, “there are so many ways for a woman to come unstitched.”
With a keen eye for description and a finely-tuned ear for dialogue, Ryan delivers a high-octane story that refuses to be put down until the last page turns.
Dollface is a horror tale ready-made for cinematic adaptation, so read this one before the movie comes out!
Lindy Ryan is an award-winning author, anthologist, and short-film director whose books and anthologies have received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Booklist and Library Journal. Several of her projects have been adapted for screen. Ryan is the current author-in-residence at Rue Morgue. Declared a “champion for women’s voices in horror” by Shelf Awareness, Ryan was named a Publishers Weekly Star Watch Honoree in 2020, and in 2022, was named one of horror’s most masterful anthology curators. Born and raised in Southeast Texas, Ryan currently resides on the East Coast. She is a professor at Rutgers University.
