The Church of Dead Girls (1997)

Not quite a typical murder mystery and not quite a conventional horror. This is a slow moving, suspense filled tale. At the start we know nothing about our narrator, except that he knows a lot about what goes on in the town of Aurelius where he lives and where teenage girls are going missing. The characters in this novel are intricately described and although this is no speed read it certainly kept me enthralled. ( )

Not exactly what I had in mind for wasting my time reading it was not that great. I reaqlly didn't like how the story was told by one person and it confused me as to who was actually speaking in the story. All the marxism talk got boring and the storyline was lacking!Just wasn't a good read! This took way too long too read meaning It was not interesting enough ....Normally a book this size takes me 2-4 days lol it sucked ( )

Stephen Dobyns is an underrated writer, I think. I haven’t read his mystery series, but I have read several of his standalone novels, and they remain memorable, even years later. The best of them is The Church of Dead Girls, which I just reread.

The Church of Dead Girls begins and ends with an unsettling, haunting image. I won’t give away the ending, but the opening scene describes three dead girls lined up in an attic, dressed to sparkle and shine in the light of hundreds of candles, like icons in a church. Thus, Dobyns plunges right into the central mystery of the novel: who killed these girls and why?

But this isn’t a typical serial-killer thriller. The story focuses on the community’s reactions to the girls’ disappearances, which fundamentally alter the small New England town where they occur. As the disappearances mount up, the townspeople become more agitated, paranoid and suspicious of one another. Any outsider, whether in appearance or behavior, is a target for suspicion. Secrets are exposed. Private lives are made public. The escalating terror drives ordinary people to do horrific things. Through the microcosm of the small town, Dobyns explores how we all react to terror, when we feel like our security and control over our lives have been wrested away. Dobyns ratchets up the tension slowly but relentlessly, and once you reach the final few chapters, it becomes very difficult to put this book down.

Part of the genius of this novel lies in the choice of narrator — not a police detective, as might be expected, but rather a middle-school science teacher who is in a position to observe everything going on in the town, yet is an outsider himself. Through his eyes, we watch the townspeople become more savage under the weight of their fears and suspicions, and we feel those suspicions directed at ourselves. Yet the reader is given reason to believe that the narrator may not be entirely trustworthy. The net effect of uncertainty and suspicion is to amplify the novel’s tension. As readers, we are living through this crisis with everyone in the town.

The Church of Dead Girls is a brilliant novel that I don’t think enough people know about. If you like thrillers, don’t overlook this one. ( )

Slow build up of tension as three teenage girls disappear from a small town. The story’s focus is on the town folk whose behaviour becomes as extreme and immoral as the killer. The narrative character is a school teacher, a local loner, whose behaviour the reader mimics as we spy into characters thoughts and motivations. ( )

In a nutshell: Creepy and well-executed exploration of a small town’s descent into suspicion and hysteria.

The Church of Dead Girls has been languishing on my shelves since 2004 – I don’t know why, it was just one of those books that never made it to the top of my TBR list. Had I known what I was missing, I would have gotten to it a lot sooner.

I picked it up a few days ago, expecting a typical mystery/suspense story. And while all the elements of that kind of novel are present, this book is much more. It is narrated by a man who protects his solitude, so while a part of the town, he is also apart from it. This allows the reader to understand the setting and characters from a near perspective, while also seeing it all from a certain remove. As young teenage girls go missing, the citizens of Aurelius, New York begin to look upon one another with increasing suspicion and a touch of hysteria descends on the town. At first, outsiders are blamed, anyone different from the established norm, but as the mystery deepens, neighbors begin to look askance at one another and families are divided.

While the mystery aspect is solid, and the suspense builds well, I was most taken with the portrait of the town and its people and their disintegration, as the community turns on itself. Dobyns does it with a light and subtle hand, so that the evolution is natural and understandable, but still haunting. ( )