The monograph collects over one hundred photographs by the artist of her dolls, carefully posed and artfully staged. Lankton rejected the smooth crotches of Barbie and G.I. Joe: her dolls have genitalia, innards, viscera.

While the book does not smell of gasoline, it does have the same effect on the reader’s body as a short sharp sudden whiff of gas. Rarely has writing captured such precarious proximity to death.