The Virgin Suicides meets I Have Some Questions For You with a dash of the horrors of Nightbitch in this debut suspense following one woman as she begins to uncover the truth of the death of her estranged best friend and the Sylvia Plath adoring girls they attended college with decades ago.
DOLL PARTS
by Penny Zang
Sourcebooks Landmark, August 2025
For Nikki and Sadie, life at Loch Raven College was supposed to be filled with poetry and days spent trying on thrifted clothes. But there’s a dark story that plagues the school halls – that of the Sylvia Club, a campus legend surrounding the death of multiple Sylvia Plath adoring girls, all written off as suicides. Aspiring writer Nikki finds herself drawn to the stories, so much so that dead girls begin to haunt her dark imagination. To satiate her obsession, Nikki begins to dig into the deaths, and she soon suspects there’s more to the story than just a tragic group of sad girls – a suspicion that will lead to a tragedy of its own, one that will tear her and Sadie apart.
It’s been twenty years since Sadie saw her estranged friend. Now, Nikki is dead. And when Sadie ends up pregnant with Nikki’s grieving husband, she finds herself stepping into her seemingly perfect life. But Nikki’s eerily preserved home seems to hold clues for Sadie from beyond-the-grave, and soon, she’s spiraling into a deep obsession that will make her question her own reality. Because it seems Nikki never stopped looking for answers about what happened to the girls of the Sylvia Club, and she may have been its latest victim.
A provocative and irresistible debut, DOLL PARTS is at once an exploration of the dark chasms that break apart friendships, an ode to the aching beauty of girlhood, and a sharp portrayal of grief that can physically haunt you.
Penny Zang is from Maryland and graduated with an MFA in Fiction from West Virginia University. Her work has appeared in the Potomac Review, Louisville Review, and Superstition Review, among others. She is the 2024 Elizabeth Boatwright Coker fiction fellow via the South Carolina Academy of Authors. She lives in South Carolina, where she teaches English at a two-year college.
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