Have You Read This? Review of Keith Donohue's The Motion of Puppets by Keith Donohue Review

Though they might never be mentioned in the Disney movies they eventually inspired, many fairy tales have a great many moments that would belong in any horror movie, from Hansel and Gretel pushing a witch into an oven to Ariel, the red-haired heroine in The Little Mermaid, gaining new legs she used to walk on land that always felt to her like she was walking on knives. Horror and fairy tales have a lot in common, particularly when the magic within the story enacts a terrible price.

Keith Donohue’s The Motion of Puppets, is a modern fairy tale. Kay, an acrobat, and Theo, a French professor, work in the city of Quebec. But their lives are uprooted when Kay discovers a mysterious puppet in a toy shop window, is transformed into a puppet, and forced to perform in the Quarte Mains show with all the other puppets who come alive from midnight to sunrise. Heartbroken, Theo searches for his wife and even risks journeying into the underworld where puppets don’t always need puppeteers.

Once Kay is transformed, the novel splits into two distinct narratives: one is Kay’s life as a puppet as she slowly forgets the human world she came from, and the other is Theo trying to deal with the loss of his wife before eventually suspending his disbelief and pursuing her into the magical realm that has ensnared her. Those who read Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” or saw Lampwick transform into a donkey in Disney’s Pinocchio know about the horror inherent in transformation and subsequent loss of identity. This helps Theo’s search for Kay become a race against time. Will she be saved before she forgets being human? Will she also forget Theo’s love?

The puppets who share Kay’s fate have very distinct personalities (some were also human once), but they are not really the nightmare fuel of a Chucky. They garner the reader’s sympathies but it isn’t the puppets that make it scary. It is the gradual loss that Kay experiences while Theo inches agonizingly close to her without finding her that creates the tension that is the lifeblood of this novel and makes it one hard to put down. People have called this “Toy Story written by Stephen King” and this book does a deft job of showing just how blurred the line is between the fantastical and the horrific.