New Arrival: The Dollhouse Family

 If many horror stories are to be believed, childhood things should not only be put away when one gets older, but maybe even burned to ash, followed by a salting of the earth it was burned on. The closet in your bedroom? There's a monster in it. Your favorite toy? There's something evil looking at you from that toy's glass eyes. Childhood is often looked at through the rose-colored lens of nostalgia, so horror just loves coming in and flipping that love of childhood and its memories on its head. If your home currently has a dollhouse in it and you read M. R. Carey's The Dollhouse Family from Hill House Comics, you'll probably consider selling it on Ebay. Or burning it. 

The Dollhouse Family is a generation-spanning tale featuring a antique dollhouse, an ageless family that lives inside it, and a girl whose life is fundamentally altered by it. Young Alice receives the dollhouse as a six-year-old and it becomes an oasis from her turbulent home life. By speaking some magic words, she is able to enter the dollhouse and spend time with her loving surrogate family. But such magical things often has very large price tags, and what lives beyond the Black Door will eventually try to collect. An adult Alice soon finds that what lives in the Dollhouse seeks entry into our world. 

Less like an actual dollhouse and more like a grandfather clock, this story has a lot of moving parts, from Alice's ancestor, to the family that occupies the Dollhouse, to Alice's struggles as a single mother. These plot points all vie for attention, but adult Alice's struggles as a mother from a broken home resonate the most as she finds herself doing the best for her daughter, even as she must come to terms with what the Dollhouse actually is. M. R. Carey, much in the same way he wrote about zombies in The Girl With All The Gifts, doesn't go for the low-hanging fruit of haunted dollhouse. This tale involves demon hunting, domestic terrorism, as well as whether it's preferable to live in a safe fantasy versus a painful reality. Add the art from Peter Gross and Vince Locke that introduces an Adult Coraline vibe, and you have a very twisting and twisted fairy tale for adults. The ending may be too out there for some, but the journey of Alice's family shows strong bonds and abiding love that no demonic children's toy can kill.
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