Lady Adelaide Rosemary Hawthorne has died. When her estranged children return to Hawthorne Manor to settle her estate, they expect cold formality, distant memories, and the promise of a generous inheritance. What they don’t expect is the attic—sealed away for years—filled with a collection of porcelain dolls, each eerily watching, their painted eyes glinting with secrets.

It is Julia, the youngest daughter, who first senses something unsettling about them. There is something in the way they seem to watch, something in the hush of the attic air that makes her hesitate. But sentimentality has no place in this home—the dolls are to be sold at auction, a condition they must accept if they want their share of the estate.

But these dolls have stories. Tales that whisper from the past, murmur through the present, and linger into the unknown future. Some stories are of love and longing, others of betrayal and blood. Some of them began long before the Hawthornes arrived, while others are only just beginning.

One by one, the dolls leave the attic, are sold at the auction, and bound off to meet their new family.

Dolls in the Attic is an eerie and evocative anthology, weaving together ghostly whispers, dark family secrets, and the chilling realization that some things—once disturbed—will never rest again.

Up, tucked away in an attic, found upon an inheritance, aristocratic, were several porcelain dolls, their stories untold, but within these walls, carried away by auctioneer, each one with a haunting, evil sneer

Includes:

PRELUDE

Before the Auction

Madame by Scott Urban

Harlen Glass’s Long Confession by Jackson Robinson

Bitter Water by R. E. Dyer

Eye of the Beholder by AudraKate Gonzalez

INTERLUDE

After the Auction

The Playthings of Dolltown by Nadine Stewart

3344 Degrees by Vanessa Leonardo

You Want to See by Jesse D. Lockhart

Our Lady of Anguish by Aleco Julius

The Back Patio Smokers by Adam Cagley

Look-alike by Greta T. Bates

POSTLUDE