The Church of Dead Girls

There is something magically to a reader about a book that opens with a great scene that sets the mood for the rest of the story to follow. On the other hand, there is something extremely frustrating about a story that doesn’t live up to that first scene. Sadly, The Church of Dead Girls by Stephen Dobyns falls into the latter category for me. Perhaps if I had started this book as a crime thriller I would be praising where it works well, but I found it disappointing.

The beginning chapter gives the reader a detailed tour of an attic where three dead girls are propped up and decorated in a deliciously creepy manner. The specifics of the scene hint at a psycho outside of the typical strangle/stab/shoot and dump the body sort of murder. Dobyns wets the audience’s appetite with this opening. I was itching to jump into this killer’s head and get to the juicy bits of crazy floating around in there. I was ready to tear into the book. However, I found the next chapters a letdown as the story pivoted away from being about a killer to the paranoia of a small dreary town where everyone knows everybody else’s business. It felt like being sold a ticket to an action movie and sitting through a historical drama that had a few battle scenes.

Dobyns builds the town of Aurelius believably. The cast of characters fill the range one would expect in every small town, from the trouble makers, to the political pot stirring outsider, to the tragic widower now a single parent, to the promiscuous woman that’s heated up the sheets of nearly every man in town. The issue I have with this approach is that the list of Aurelius’ inhabitants is long and annoying to read through. Everyone has history and people have complicated relationships with each other. It was difficult to connect deeply with any of the characters. I didn’t find any of them really likeable either, but I think part of that was the distance. These were people I was hearing about from afar rather than experiencing the story through them. I was peeping in their town, listening at the door and looking through windows. Dobyns may have put these characters at a distance to purposely give the reader the feel of spying on this little community and to provide a good chunk of suspects. However, this kept me from becoming invested in the characters and made much of this a chore to read.

The strange first person POV also kept me at a distance. The unnamed narrator is retelling the story much like someone gossiping at times. Other times, the narrator switches into a weirdly omniscient voice that is able to recount other character’s feelings and events that our first person narrator couldn’t possibly have any knowledge about. Not only is this an unreliable narrator, he’s an inconsistent and impossible one. I didn’t find the narrator any more likeable than the townsfolk, although I did empathize with him a smidgen more. He feels like an outsider in this community yet is roped into the town’s drama. Growning up in a small town myself that I didn’t fit well in, I can understand the narrator on that level. Beyond that, I felt as removed from him as I did with everyone else in Aurelius.

The slow deterioration of the town into chaos as the girls disappeared was well done. As I mentioned before, had I gone into this book from a thriller perspective I think I would have enjoyed it more. Watching the suspicions flare up the prejudices that lie just beneath the surface of the town was as chilling as the murders. In a way, the killer is almost an afterthought as the decent of the town consumes the majority of the plot. The group mentality here is unnerving; those considered outsiders are targeted first. The longtime residents can’t fathom that one of their own could possibly be responsible for the missing girls. The death of the new professor, who brought his Marxist viewpoints to the sleepy town, was a nice touch on showing the radical opposition to any ideas or beliefs that are not accepted by the community. Once the citizens turn on each other, violence and vandalism are rationalized as “doing the right thing” when in fact it is fear that is driving them. The case clearly made that no one can hide in a seemingly safe place from the evils of humanity.

The ending was handled with a heavy dose of symbolism. The killer is shot in the back, thereby betrayed, by his own brother, which mirrors how neighbor turned on neighbor throughout the ordeal. The cutting off of the left hand by the killer is his acceptance of his own sexual/dirty nature. The interesting twist at the end of the narrator stealing the killer’s hand and preserving it wrapped up the theme of the story perfectly – the brutal and sexual urges that plagued the killer can be found in everyone, so there is no one you can trust.

Overall, this is probably a better book than I’m giving it credit for here. I expected a story centered on a psychopathic murder, and when I didn’t get that story I was immediately discouraged. My disappointment colored my reading. Though the book is not without its faults, I will probably read it again the in the future as there were parts that interested me. So, if you’re looking for a book about a killer, look elsewhere. If you want a creepy glimpse into small town hysteria, this might be worth a read.