But why stop at toys? Jerry Seinfeld has plans to direct, produce, co-write and star in “Unfrosted: The Pop Tart Story,” for Netflix.
For now there’s “Holly Horror,” a new middle-grade novel, written by Michelle Jabès Corpora, the first in a planned series. Its star is Holly Hobbie, perhaps best remembered by Gen-Xers as a freckle-faced, frilly doll. This is not Holly’s first appearance outside the doll world: She has already morphed into picture books, dolls, glassware, an animated Nickelodeon series and a five-season live-action series, starring Ruby Jay.
Wholesome Holly, perhaps not surprisingly, was inspired by a line of American Greetings cards. New England illustrator Denise Holly Hobbie (neé Ulinskas), created Holly in the 1960s — a faceless, nameless girl in profile, wearing an old-fashioned bonnet and a long patchwork dress — a dead ringer for Sunbonnet Sue, whose image gave the name to an enduring patchwork quilt pattern dating back to the 1800s. By the late 1960s, the card girl had a name, dubbed Holly Hobbie by its creator, and also a face, a relief to those of us who as children found something faintly disturbing about that original image. Who — or what — hid behind that huge sunbonnet? Was she a human, a doll, or something so terrible it couldn’t be revealed?
These questions serve as the jumping off point of “Holly Horror” — a slightly odd choice for a supernatural novel, but writers have generated terror from items as mundane as bedsheets (M.R. James’s classic “Casting the Runes”) and combs (Oliver Onions’s “The Beckoning Fair One”). Dolls, of course, are a perennial source of unease and outright terror: Who knows what they get up to while we’re asleep? This is a time-tested scare point for kids; adult readers of “Holly Horror” will get the extra creepy factor seeing their innocent child-doll turn evil.
Jabès Corpora brings an impressive set of chops to her reimagining of this material. She holds a master’s degree in children’s literature, and worked as an editor at Greenwillow Books imprint. She’s ghostwritten numerous books for young readers, including best-selling Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys mysteries, a historical novel set in Oklahoma during the Depression, and a biography of pioneering war journalist Martha Gellhorn. As a franchise novel, “Holly Horror” punches above its weight, even if it can’t quite escape the constraints of its anodyne source material.
After her parents divorce, 15-year-old Evie Archer and her younger brother Stan move with their mother from Manhattan to Ravenglass, a picturesque small town in the Berkshires. They leave behind a three-bedroom apartment, school friends, Mom’s 12-hour shifts at the Hyatt, and a father who remains a frustratingly vague presence until the novel’s end. Their mother has meager savings, so she calls her sister and asks, “Martha, do you think we could move to Hobbie House?”
“Hobbie House. Those words had been spoken in hushed tones throughout Evie’s life, like a curse.”
Abandoned and overgrown, the 200-year old Hobbie House — Horror House to the locals — appears desolate atop its hill overlooking the town, but Evie pushes aside her fears. “It was just an old house that needed a few coats of paint and some pruning shears. Nothing more.”
Um, if you say so, Evie. In Ravenglass they’re met by Martha, a professional psychic who resembles “a fairy-tale witch.” Aunt Martha acts as caretaker for Hobbie House but keeps her own apartment in town, where she does Tarot readings. She and Evie’s mother are sisters, and decades earlier as children often visited Hobbie House, where their cousin, Holly Hobbie, grew up.
On Oct. 30, 1982, Holly — the same age as Evie is now — disappeared without a trace. Even now, the Lost Girl of Ravenglass is never referred to in the past tense. “Since she was never found, and a body never recovered, Holly seemed to exist in a nebulous place, between life and death. Like Schrödinger’s cat, [Evie] thought.”
It’s a captivating premise, especially once Evie starts seeing shadowy figures in broad daylight and finds an old attic trunk filled with surprisingly well-preserved bolts of old fabric, moldering cassette tapes, teen magazines and creepy patchwork dolls, including one that talks when Evie pulls its drawstring.
“I feel so very, very sick … Will you take care of me?” the doll asks, then begins to sing the old children’s rhyme, “Playmate, come out and play with me …”
Of course, Evie doesn’t run. Instead, she puts on an ancient bonnet she finds in the trunk, at which point adult readers may feel that Evie deserves whatever comes.
Unfortunately, “Holly Horror” never really leans into the scares promised by its title, even as Evie becomes possessed by the same ghostly patchwork girl who lured Holly Hobbie to her fate. Too much attention is squandered on generic high school stuff, especially a squadron of mean girls led by Kimber, the mayor’s daughter, and her nasty younger brother Dylan, who draws Evie’s brother Stan into his orbit. The story itself feels like a patchwork of cultural touchstones, including “Gilmore Girls,” the 1982 film “Poltergeist,” and Stephen King’s “Carrie,” among others.
All or most of this is surely deliberate, as Jabès Corpora is a talented author in her own right. “Holly Horror” takes on an appealingly dark sheen when the author lets her own voice and vision come through, as in scenes where Evie sews her homecoming dress from the old fabric she found at Hobbie House, and when she first sees what lies behind that antiquated bonnet (just what I feared all those years ago). The finale seems to tie everything up too neatly, until its final sentences — a slingshot ending that made me jump. Young readers will find “Holly Horror” spooky, but not too spooky. We’ll save the real terrors for Barney.
Elizabeth Hand’s novel “A Haunting on the Hill,” inspired by Shirley’s Jackson’s “The Haunting of Hill House,” will be published this fall.
By Michelle Jabès Corpora
Penguin Workshop. 311 pp. $18.99
A note to our readers
We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program,
an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking
to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.
