A short story published as a book, Among the Dolls is barely 70 pages long and that's including Trina Schart Hyman's Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark-esque illustrations, but in that 70 pages, Sleator demonstrates why people are banning the wrong books. If anyone really cared about protecting the minds of children, they would burn all of William Sleators output immediately because reading one of his books is like staring into a howling insanity vortex.
Vicky is a twerp who drops heavy-handed hints that she wants a ten-speed bike for her birthday but instead her parents get her a “musty antique dollhouse with old-fashioned, faded furniture and dolls” that “cast an aura of gloom over her bright bedroom.” Even worse, Vicky realized "she would have to be alone with it at night."
The dollhouse has four dolls, a mother, a father, a matron aunt, and a little girl and it begins to exert a sick fascination on Vicky. She decides to make it hers by adding a new doll, one she picks, and she badgers her remote, Chopin-playing mom into giving her money to buy a little plastic baby she sticks inside. Now feeling a sense of ownership, Vicky starts to play with her dollhouse and it's all normal everyday activities like cooking and eating and going to bed until, as Sleator informs us, "one night at dinner the doll family began to fight."
As the doll family fight, things in Vicky's house change. Her Mom falls down the stairs and hurts her hands so badly she can't play the piano anymore, so she starts to take it out on Vicky's Dad who begins retreating more often to his basement study. Vicky can't make friends at school, she fights constantly with her Mom, and the dolls aren't doing any better. The Mother Doll begins to beat her husband, and scrub her daughter's and baby's faces and hands brutally, before locking them in their rooms. One day, Vicky brings home a terrible report card and instead of showing it to her parents she runs upstairs and as she gets close to the dollhouse she gets dizzy and wakes up inside the dollhouse. She’s turned into a doll.
This is where Sleator's sick genius becomes apparent.
There's no magic here. At her new size, everything looks crude and coarse. The miniature toys and furniture, now normal sized, reveal their sharp edges and rough seams. The music box she thought played such a pretty tune sounds like gruesome clanging. The stairs in the dollhouse are too steep. The rooms being cut in half make everything feel precarious, like you’re constantly on the edge of falling out. Even worse, when the matron Aunt doll appears she says through her permanently smiling mouth, "Aha. You are small and helpless now, I see."
The dolls are hideous. Grimy and poorly made, chipped and gnarled, hair falling out, clothes barely fitting, they’re living monsters with faces that smile no matter how menacing they become, and they become plenty menacing. They've named themselves, Quimbee (the Father), Diadama (the Aunt), Ganglia (the Daughter), and Dandaroo (the Baby). The Mother, I don't believe, ever gets a name. She's just The Mother.
And they are evil.
They are cruel and mean and conniving and hateful and they are what Vicky has made them. She forced them to cook fake food they didn't want to eat (because dolls don't eat), then made them sit at the table staring at each other for hours. She made them lie on blocks of wood covered in thin layers of fabric to simulate sleep but dolls don't sleep and so they lay there for the bulk of their nights. "She had created them," Sleator writes. "And now they were turned against her."
The horror of this becomes most apparent on Vicky's first night. Trapped in the patterns she's given them, the dolls sit around the dinner table with Vicky as it gets dark, the fading light slowly erasing their forms, until they're all sitting in the pitch black, with no sound but the occasional creak of wooden joints or the rustle of skirts.
"At night, the dollhouse was very dark."
So's Sleator! It turns out that there's another dollhouse hidden in the secret attic of this dollhouse, one that's a replica of Vicky's house, complete with a Mother, a Father, and a Little Girl. As Vicky forced these dolls to fight and bicker, acting out her drama on them, they acted out their drama on her, making her Mother fall down the stairs, making her bully Vicky's Father, and now they've removed Vicky's doll from the house, which brought her here. Vicky has to storm the attic, with the assistance of poor, sad, tormented Dandaroo, where she must find the doll of herself and put it back in the house. The attic is a horror show of real spider webs and dead flies the size of her arm, but ultimately she's successful and Sleator ends the book with the dollhouse being given away when her parents decide she's too obsessed with it.
"Whatever would happen with the dollhouse now was not for her to decide," Sleator writes, bringing his tiny chamber of horrors to a close.
An overly talented kid who grew up in a house with two hyper-talented siblings, and two scarily smart parents whose parenting skills may not have been the best, Sleator wrote frequently about dysfunctional families and sibling rivalries, and he sharpens his talent to a gleaming razor's edge in Among the Dolls, accomplishing in 70 pages what some writers can't do in 350.