It'll Be Your New Best Friend

TRIGGER WARNING: CREEPY DOLLS.  If this is a fear of yours, please back away now.

 Hi all!  You know what time it is! I'm bringing a fourth tale of terror and frights.  Like Rin Chupeco, Danielle Valentine is a new author to me and is part of the new wave of Are You Afraid Of The Dark? merchandise.  And so, let's get down to it. Submitted for the approval of my fellow readers, I call this: the Review Of The Tale Of The Twisted Toymaker.

Characters: Layla Griffith, Dylan Cane (crush, secondary character)

Premise: A girl races to save her sister when she realizes that the doll she bought her is trying to take over her life.

Layla Griffith buys a fancy doll for her eight-year-old sister, Emily that's basically her mini-me named Grace and she gets weirded out when the proprietor of the store---Ms. Mabel---starts taking measurements of Emily "for the doll" and honestly, if it was me, I woulda noped out there, getting my money back and buying my younger sister---not that I have one----something else.  I don't care how dedicated a dollmaker is, if they start taking measurements for the doll, that's when you get the heck out of Dodge.  But if they had done that, there woulda been no story, so I digress.  When the doll comes in, Layla finds the doll that her best friend Quinn once had and takes it out of the shop, which, remember, stealing is bad, people.

Anyway, at first, Layla thinks everything is fine as she joins a singing troupe called Free Verse where she meets Dylan Cane, and to her surprise, they're partnered up for a duet.  Sounds great, right?  Right.  She's on top of the world and she's very happy.  But of course, it changes in that strange things start to happen, such as their cat, Anne Boleyn---why would you name your poor cat that?----gets a scratch on its face as if fighting a rat, but Layla starts to suspect that it's Grace and the Quinn-doll (as it was called), and things get worse when Emily starts getting sicker and sicker, eventually slipping into a coma while her doll ends up looking more human, and honestly, even though I don't believe in the supernatural, I would get suspicious if my kid suddenly got sick after getting a new toy, but then again, it's very easy to criticize the people we're reading about.

To Layla's surprise, when she tells his suspicions to Dylan, he not only believes her, he reveals that his aunt used to tell a story about a dollmaker in her town back in the nineties, and after some research, it's revealed that Ms. Mabel and her dolls have been around since 1903, and that she's been using an amulet and the life-force of children to stay young.  Layla and Dylan are reunited with Quinn who reveals that she started to turn into a doll a couple of years prior and her parents had been trying to find a cure to no avail.

Ultimately, Layla finds the amulet, destroys it, and the dolls go back to being dolls while Emily's health is restored and Layla and Dylan perform their duet. There's a bit of a "final jump scare" where Layla thinks she sees a doll that looks like Dylan but whether or not she really did is left up in the air.

As far as AYAOTD? stories go, this was pretty solid.  It was sufficiently spooky, but the only thing that disappointed me was that it said "presenting the tale of....." instead of "submitted for the approval of the Midnight Society", so I'd give it a 9 instead of a 10.

With that, I declare this review over.