The Church of Dead Girls, or "Stephen Dobyns Opens a Phone Book and Tells Us About Everybody In It. And, Oh Yeah, One of Them is a Murdering Pscho" by Stephen Dobyns

The Church of Dead Girls is, quite possibly, the most painful read I’ve had in quite some time. I really wanted this semester to be the one where I don’t bash a book, especially one written by such a prolific author.

I’ll start with the cast of characters. It’s a mighty list and Dobyns exhaustively goes into detail about just about everybody in the town. Where they grew up, when they moved away, when they moved back, what they were like as a kid, who dated who, and what each of their houses is like. It’s a list that’s designed to say that anybody is a suspect, keep your eye on them. Because there are so many characters, and the identity of the killer isn’t exposed until about twenty pages from the end, trying to play along and sort out the clues is akin to guessing how many gumballs are in a fishbowl… there's no possible way of actually knowing, so you just throw out a random number and maybe you’re right. So I’ll say that when I found out who the killer was, I just didn’t care. I was just glad it was over.

Red herrings. There were more red herrings in this book than at a communist fish market. There were characters and events that only served to muddy the waters, and it wasn’t even in a fun way. We’re told at the beginning of the book from our narrator (I’ll get to that guy in a minute) that everything is connected, but the connections are forced. They’re more implied than actual, and only served to give Dobyns an opportunity to set up a soap box and wax philosophical about small towns and the human condition.

Our narrator, who I don’t believe we’re ever given a name for—egad how frustrating it was to go on a 400+ page adventure with somebody who didn’t even tell us his name—seemed to know everything about everything that occurred, and for somebody who claimed to be a private person he sure as hell must have talked to everybody in town to get the level of detail he achieved. There were some details he never bothered to attribute, and were of such an intimate nature the question of how he knew about them begged to be asked. Let me re-iterate: He never told me his name. It’s like picking up a hitch hiker, listening to him tell a 12 hour story about a bunch of people he knew, but never finding out his name. That’s a key part to any relationship, and I just dedicated a week of my life to this guy. I’ve never had a one-night stand, but I believe this is the literary equivalent, and I hated it.

Dobyns' mastery of the past perfect tense is awe-inspiring… and downright annoying. There was a “had” in almost every sentence. I was counting on one page and when I got the tenth sentence, there was a double “had.” A “had had” right there. I actually took extra-strength Excedrin to get through the rest of the chapter.

The book opened with a description of a crime scene, and it was a pretty good. I felt optimistic about the story. But that’s the problem when you start a story in present tense, and then go 400 pages of past perfect, it gets muddled down by phrasing. The psycho seemed almost cartoonish, a caricature of what a psycho should be. Maybe it’s because we found out more about the bartender’s motives in life than we did our antagonist, but he was such a paper-thin character throughout the book, that there wasn’t a whole lot to go back on and say, “yup, shoulda seen that coming.” He was a peripheral character who seemed like a normal enough fellow. I know, I know, that’s the point, right? Dobyns hit us over the head with his “you don’t really know the person next to you” sermons, and BAM! there it is.

I’m sure this book has its fans, but I’m not one of them. Call me uneducated or obtuse, but this book left me angry at the end. Not because of the ending, but because the whole thing was such an epic time-suck. It is unnecessarily long in my opinion, but others may argue that the deep characterization of the townfolk is imperative to the story. That our narrator tells us so much about them and yet, we know very little about them and the people in our own lives.

It would make me think harder about that message if the delivery wasn’t so flawed.

What I did enjoy about this book was the absurd response the town had to the disappearance of three young girls. From roving bands of vigilantes to paranoid finger-pointing, the hysterics grow with each abduction until it teeters on all-out mayhem. It was fun to watch people grow ignorant from fear. And it seemed especially poignant in this day and age.