Stephen Dobyns

The Burn Palace begins with a maternity nurse discovering that one of the newborns in her care has disappeared and has been replaced by a six-foot corn snake, and it just gets wilder from there. Dobyns brings in a huge case of characters, residents of the fictional small town of Brewster, Rhode Island, as well as renegade coyotes, mysterious Satanists, and a rampaging lunatic to terrify them all. But at the heart of a story is a mystery, and State Trooper Woody Potter doggedly pursues the show more solution while reminding us that it's all about the baby.

Dobyns juggles his cast of characters gracefully, giving us readers time to get to know the various cops, kids, town characters, and even dogs that populate Brewster, so we can better care about their safety as things start ramping up. His omniscient narrator relates the story with a folksy voice, almost as if he's sitting beside us and whispering in our ear. The petty politics and soap opera-like relationships of small-town life gradually take on sinister undertones as the plot unravels. It became very difficult to put the book down once all the pieces start whirling together.

This was a fun and thrilling read, reminiscent of Dobyns' The Church of Dead Girls or one of Stephen King's small-town tales. For me, the only major flaw was the hint of magical realism, never fully explained or incorporated fully into the overall story. But that is more than made up for by Dobyns' characters, setting, and audacious plot. show less

Wow. That was a wild ride from start to finish. Intense, complex and unique, I thoroughly devoured The Church of Dead Girls. I often read on my walk to work in the morning but today I sat down at my desk and just had to finish the last few pages, I absolutely could not tear my eyes away from the page.

Ostensibly, The Church of Dead Girls is about the disappearance of three girls in a small New York town above the Finger Lakes. Told from the outsider perspective of a high school science show more teacher, the lives and secrets of his fellow citizens are revealed slowly, their layers peeled away as the tension between friends and neighbours ratchets up. The abduction of the girls is both horrific and a catalyst, the townfolk growing increasingly mad with frustration and suspicion, and fear. Not only fear of their daughter being taken next, but of their secret desires, their illicit actions being exposed and revealed to the cruel eye of the town's populace, the only judge that matters.

As I was reading I was often reminded of Gillian Flynn's Sharp Objects, to which The Church of Dead Girls seems to be a spiritual precursor. There's a creeping, unsettling feeling that only grows as you advance in the story. Like Sharp Objects the disappearance and probable murders of the missing girls, barely in their teenage years, is only part of a larger whole. The narrator relates decades worth of information, gleaned from years of personal interactions or heard secondhand from his friends, piecing together the story from what he's been told into a rich, meaty narrative.

The real story that lurks behind the abduction of the three teenage girls is the unknowable nature of the other. Even those closest to us have their secrets, the thoughts they keep to themselves, a persona they show the world that reflects only a portion of their true self. The mercurial nature of a community influenced by gossip and speculation, suspicion and fear, is as fascinating as it is frustrating. The 'other' is always targeted, the African college professor and his Marxist reading group, gay men, anyone who stands out from the 'norm' suffering from hysterical scapegoating.

Overall, The Church of Dead Girls is slow, but taut, deftly portraying the way a small community operates, the way lives intersect and affect each other. The way the town reacts to the missing girls as scarring and long-lasting as the abductions themselves, mob mentality showing the unintended dark sides of even the innocent. show less

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 show more 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. show less

Over forty years of friendship, rivalry, envy, fear, and hatred collide at a semi-annual dinner party held in an unnamed South American country. Even as the three guests arrive at the ornate home of Dr. Daniel Pacheco, an eminent surgeon, a revolution has erupted in the streets of the city. As the violence outside intensifies so does the psychological and physical violence among the four middle aged men assembled to look back over their lives. At the center of it all is Pacheco's housemaid, show more Antonia Puccini. Pacheco and Puccini have a grisly hold over each other that has stretched out over twenty years. This night, the night of the banquet, reveals all their secrets, strips away all their masks and facades, and culminates in a scene of destroyed lies and lives.

It may appear that it is the outside world working its way into the fragile mental worlds of the dinner goers so carefully constructed over the past four decades. But is that so? Is it really the outside that causes the final unmasking of Pacheco, his maid, and his guests? As their dishonest inner psyches collapse one by one, each person reveals themselves as something of a monster. Dalakis, the sentimental government official, is the least offensive of the lot, although even he is revealed as something of an emotional vampire feeding off the tragedies of others while displaying his own hurt at his wife's leaving him. Malgiolio, a gluttonous ne'er-do-well, destroys his own future and that of his family in pursuit of a humiliating sexual perversion. And Nicolas Batterby, a literary editor and the novel's narrator, denies his past, his son, and wife, all out of wounded pride and vanity. Above them, Pacheco and Puccini act as puppet masters, manipulating the guests and each other, while positioning themselves for the ultimate dramatic reveal at the end. And simultaneous with it all, the world outside is coming apart. It is as if the outer world is the more temporary construct, for after the night of horrors ends, a new world easily emerges.

In terms of exploring psychological depths, Dobyns' novel is among the best. His clarity of style meshes with his ease of form, while focusing on the subtleties of peeling away the layers of self-delusion. Yet at the end, is it at all sure that the truth is known? For even the narrator has proven unreliable and the stories of the others seem altered when their motivations seem to disappear and then reestablish themselves in other ways. Nothing is true, really, except for Pacheco's and Puccini's release from their gradual dance towards destruction. show less