DOLLFACE: A Novel

AN INSTANT USA TODAY BEstseller!


a variety, bloody disgusting, Shereads, macabre Daily, CRIMEREADS, Capes & Tights, and more Most Anticipated thriller for Spring 2026

A new york post page-turning thriller

winner of the 2026 inaugural astra book award

Barbie meets Scream with a nostalgic 90s twist in
​this horror romp.

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.

macmillan

Books-A-Million

Amazon

Bookshop

Barnes & Noble

praise for Dollface

"[A} playful horror thriller." –New York Post

"Ryan’s suburban slasher pits gossipy PTA moms against a slasher, making for a juicy, irreverent and bloody twist on the genre." –Variety

"Thank God for books like DOLLFACE and writers like Ryan...Yes, the characters are relatable, well-drawn, and interesting. Yes, this plot moves. Yes, Ryan kept me guessing til the end...Lindy Ryan hands women the horror fix they crave." –Cemetery Dance

"Lindy Ryan continues to build a reputation as one of the most unput-downable authors of the current horror generation, and readers who embrace DOLLFACE's overall tone will be reading this one late into the night." –Bloody Disgusting

"A modern, female-centered riff on the slasher tradition... DOLLFACE stands as a bright, blood-streaked love letter to slasher films filtered through the lens of suburban satire and feminine rage." –Horror DNA

"Come for the blood, but hang around for the twist as Ryan has more than one trick up her sleeve... Ryan manages to pull the rug from under the rug and, in doing so, creates one of the most surprising and fun endings to a horror novel in a while. Ryan shows her mastery of the genre." –Gruesome Magazine

"Bloody, fast-paced, unhinged, and darkly humorous, Lindy Ryan’s DOLLFACE takes on conformity, trauma, friendship, loneliness, and the masks we all wear in gruesome retro fashion right until the very last twist." –Riotus 

"DOLLFACE is riotous, ribald fun from beginning to end. A scathing satire that skewers suburban norms and mores where nobody notices the superficiality until it’s splattered with blood." –BookTrib

"In Ryan’s fabulous new slasher, the satire cuts sharper than the murder weapon." –CrimeReads

"Lindy Ryan’s novels are always a blast, and this one in particular feels like a treat." –Bloody Disgusting

“A whimsical, bloody, unsettling suburban slasher with an unexpected twist that will hit way too close to home for any mom who'd rather face a serial killer than a PTA meeting. I connected to the final girl on a molecular level!” –New York Times bestselling author, Delilah S. Dawson

"A twisty, gory homage to the slasher, with a horror writer heroine who's just a little too knowledgeable about genre tropes...Dollface is a whole lot of bloody fun." –Christina Henry, author of Alice and The Place Where They Buried Your Heart

"Dollface is Stepford meets Stephen King—sharp and sinister in all the best ways. A twisted joy for horror fans." –James "Murr" Murray and Daren Wearmouth, Bestselling Co-Authors of The Stowaway and You Better Watch Out

"Lindy Ryan's suburban giallo goes for the gullet, then slices right through. DOLLFACE stands proudly within the new slasher canon alongside the works of Stephen Graham Jones and Brian McAuley, finding fresh weapons to render the reader's imagination into the reddest of ribbons." –Clay McLeod Chapman, author of Wake Up and Open Your Eyes 

“Imagine Real Housewives: Friday the 13th edition, and you’ll have an idea of how much gory fun awaits you in DOLLFACE.  This twisty slasher novel screams Lindy Ryan’s mischievous and bloodthirsty talent!” —Christopher Golden, New York Times bestselling author of The Night Birds and Road of Bones

“Literary slashers are having a moment right now, but I’m hard pressed to think of one in any medium like Lindy Ryan’s DOLLFACE. Equal parts Stephen Graham Jones, Rachel Harrison, Ira Levin, and Sarah Langan, with a trenchant wit, rip-roaring pace, real anger, and one of the most unsettling opening chapters I’ve read in decades.” —Nat Cassidy, USA Today bestselling author of When the Wolf Comes Home and Mary 

excerpt

The neon open sign in the Dream Bean Café window reflects red off the blade laid across the passenger seat of the idling car.

Knives don’t gleam in real life, the woman in the driver’s seat thinks as she considers the long silver instrument — the sharp edge and blunt tip, the crimson glow that bleeds across the metal and into the ornate mother-of-pearl handle. Not like they do in the movies, anyway.

This dull truth had first reared its ugly head on her wedding day. An odd thing for the woman to think as she’d stood dressed all in white, her brand-new husband tuxxed beside her, the bridal-shower cake knife not gleaming in her hands at it slid between frosted layers of Chantilly lace. Girlhood daydreams and bridal magazines promised glitz and sparkle on her Big Day, but the whole event had turned out as dull as the blade’s rounded end. The walk up the aisle, short. The kiss, quick and perfunctory. The frosting gummed along the elongated metal shaft, too sweet.

The cake, dry.

Even now the woman can taste the pastry, lodged against her uvula at the back of her throat. She’s choked down so much since her wedding day, but never the single bite of that $700 dessert. Still the aftertaste of raspberry filling clings to her soft palate, as thick and heady and floral as menstrual blood.

The woman’s mouth waters, and she blinks away from the knife, careful to keep her face hidden in the approaching shadows as the evening’s last customers straggle out of the quieting café, sugar-stained pastry bags like pendulums at their sides.

She reaches to the fuse box under the sedan’s dashboard, pulls the plastic tooth, and drops it into the cupholder. Then she sits and waits as sunset broadsides into dusk.

The sky burns orange, the neon-red open sign flicks off, and the Dream Bean goes dark. The woman watches the late-shift employees trickle out through the double doors, past the window painted with sprawling tempera foliage. A lone figure stays behind to close up, and the woman watches as the figure locks the door from inside and disappears within the empty café. When only two vehicles remain on the far edge of the lot, the woman twists the key in the ignition and the idling car shudders still.

Burning dusk bruises blue.

The crackle of the pink rain poncho over the woman’s clothes breaks the thickening quiet when she shifts in the driver’s seat to twist off her wedding ring. She deposits the diamonds in the car’s cupholder alongside the plastic tooth, smooths flyaway hair beneath the poncho’s plastic hood and pinches the drawstring tight. Years of practice help her slide the long yellow dishwashing mitts up her arms as easy as opera gloves. The woman balls her fists to loosen the rubber. She rubs her feet together, listening for the sibilant whisper of the bootees covering her shoes.

The drawstring chews into the underside of the woman’s chin when she smiles.

Time to put her face on.

Shadows crowd the car’s interior as the woman lifts the mask from her lap. She slides the thin plastic sheath over her head, careful not to scratch it against the bridge of her nose. With her eyes closed, she twitches the mask into position, lifts a dish-gloved hand and flips the visor.

The woman’s new doll’s face opens its eyes.

Had its fuse still been engaged, the sedan’s bright vanity would illuminate the flawless skin, long lashes and rosebud lips of her new doll face — the perfect arch of her sculpted brows, her sunshine-yellow locks curled under an angled jaw. Her brilliant smile, whiter even than the creamy frosting of that tiered Chantilly wedding cake.

A bead of sweat prickles on the doll’s upper lip and she licks the salt away, tongue slithering along the smooth grooves of the mask’s backside. She exhales a warm breath, and the plastic sucks against her skin, melding the layers together.

This face feels better than her other one.

The doll cracks open the driver’s-side door, waits until the dome courtesy light goes dark, then reaches to the passenger seat. Her nylon dish gloves squelch as one palm wraps around the knife’s handle, and she lifts the blade to eye level, squinting through the narrow slits of her new eyes.

Let them eat cake, she thinks. One of the most infamous things a woman probably never said.

The doll mouths the words again as she watches the overhead lights inside the Dream Bean flip off one by one, until the only bulb still burning is the one near the café’s back exit.

A streetlamp at the far end of the parking lot statics on.

She slips the cake knife under the pink poncho and pushes her car door open. When she’s free of the car, she presses her hip against the driver’s-side door until it clicks closed.

It’s late enough in the year that the weather turns cool after sunset, but not far enough into autumn to keep sweat from pooling in the hollows of the doll’s body — under her arms, beneath her breasts, between her thighs. Muggy dark licks the backs of the doll’s knees as she pads across the parking lot, sweat slicking the plastic poncho to her skin like a pink shell as she patters toward the closed Dream Bean Café. Few cameras wait in the small alley behind the café, but the doll is camera ready. Soon the Dumpsters will be full of sugar-soaked trash and just desserts.

The doll slips around the side of the building, her poncho scratching across the wall as perspiration spreads under the mask. By the time she reaches the café’s back door, sweat collects on her eyelids. A thin line trickles down the center of her back, too far to reach and too humid to try.

Nearly 20 years fill the space between the doll’s wedding day and this night. The cake knife has long since been cleaned of its gobbed frosting and dusty pastry, put away and forgotten along with its serving bride. So has the doll, tucked inside the confines of marital bliss and domesticity, tethered to the expectations of wife, mother, homemaker.

She’s had bloody, saccharine cake stuck at the back of her throat for years — but not after tonight.

Tonight, she’s the knife, and for the first time, she’ll cut her own damn cake.

                                                                                                                                                                                       >>>Read the full excerpt on People