'The sleeping wood had wakened. Her pearl teeth crashed against his with the sound of cymbals and her warm, fragrant breath blew around him like an Italian gale.' Dolls, mannequins, humanoid toys and dummies are the quintessential symbols of the uncanny, referenced by Freud in his foundational essay on the phenomenon of the familiar-turned-unsettling, and remaining a terrifying recurring menace of horror media today. In this new collection, Elizabeth Dearnley revives a sinister troupe of uncannily animated figures from tales across the 19th and 20th centuries, by authors including E T A Hoffmann, Angela Carter, Vernon Lee, Algernon Blackwood and Rosemary Timperley. Terror and nightmares await when the doors of the doll house swing open and its denizens come out to play. Elizabeth Dearnley is a folklorist, artist and Lecturer in Creative Writing at Edinburgh Napier University. Her work includes immersive retellings of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s ‘The Sandman’ (Freud Museum London) and the Cottingley Fairies, and she has edited the British Library fiction anthologies Into the London Fog and Fearsome Fairies .