Dolly: A Ghost Story Analysis

Dolly: A Ghost Story is a novella written by Susan Hill in 2012, and tells of two cousins, Edward and Leonora and the strange events that happen in their lives due to an episode of rage Leonora suffers in her childhood. The story starts with Edward and Leonora coming to live with their Aunt Kestrel. While Edward is an introvert and scared of everything, Leonora is spoiled and entitled. She also experiences bouts of violent rage at anything that doesn’t go her way. During one such episode, she throws away a doll, the titular doll, and this starts a china of events that affect the life of both children.

While the novella is called a ghost story, it can’t be properly justified, as the book has no ghosts but it certainly has supernatural elements. These elements are at no point explained, so one can’t really infer the reason behind the suffering the two characters have to live with. The actual events depicted in this tale were less terrifying than the atmospheric creepiness that emanated from the page. Hill's prowess, here, lay in the evocative depiction of weather and landscape that pervaded the senses with fear. Fog-encapsulated houses, rural cemeteries deluged in rain, and low-rolling and thunder-heavy clouds, threatening the earth with all they contain, were only the beginning of the chill setting this story contained.

However, the atmosphere that is created is not justified by the turn of the events the story takes. Hill adds a lot of details that appear redundant in the over-all plot, and just leaves more questions and confusion among readers. Hill never reasonably explains or offers an inkling as to a) Why does Edward hear rustling in his bedroom on the first night...days before he even meets Leonora and weeks before the doll smashing which supposedly begins the horror b) What was Leonora? Hill sometimes presents her as just a spoilt brat but at one point she is described, as Edward sees her crouching in the graveyard, as evil and full of menace and hate. Is she supposed to be possessed or captured by some evil residing in the doll, or the house, or her unloving mother or somewhere else. The questions are never answered fully and the ending feels anti-climactic.