THE CHURCH OF DEAD GIRLS by stephen dobyns

I have mixed feelings about this book. It is an interesting enough story and it accomplishes several things. 1. It establishes a clear sense of community (or lack of one). There is so much detail that I get that small town feeling where everybody knows everybody else's business. 2. The increasing paranoia of the town comes across wonderfully. The townspeople go from mildly suspicious to shoot-first-ask-questions-later (if at all). The paranoia is almost justified because there are kids involved. At the same time though, they go completely overboard (ransacking a home, for example). 3. The frustrations of people taking the law into their own hands are depicted so clearly that it was a bit scary. I could see people really acting like that and I think that is why it is scary. The mob mentality of angry groups always makes me nervous, and in this book there is a group of people who are both angry and scared. That is just a dangerous combination. In addition, the way this mob develops is interesting. It starts out as the "Friends," a group of people dedicated to finding the missing girls. But it turns into a pretend police force; I could almost picture angry villagers with torches and pitchforks.

All of those elements combine in such a way that this novel seems to have more than one "psycho." The most obvious psycho is the man abducting and killing the girls. But so many other crimes and murders take place, that there are several "psychos" in this one town. Dobyns did such a great job of showing this entire community that it seemed reasonable that the real "psycho" could have been anybody. I liked trying to figure out who it could be and it felt like I had an endless cast of characters from which to choose.

On the other hand, there were two things that I did not like. 1. The point of view. It is a first person narrator, but it really sounds like a thrid person omniscient narrator. This guy seems to know everything. And there are even a few times when the narrator tells us how he knows certain things (that he overheard a conversation, that he was told from another person, etc.). I just felt like the reader knew so much about everybody that a first person narrator was a bad fit. At the same time, it made the narrator seem like a creepy know-it-all and I thought he would turn out to be the murderer. This is not a big enough issue that it made me dislike the book; I simply remember stopping to think about it a couple of times. 2. The pace/details. I understand that all of the details were most likely necessary; it is how the reader learns so much about this town and its inhabitants. It is also how the author creates atmosphere. However, it felt like a little much at times. Sometimes I would get a bit mixed up about which characers were which and at other times the book felt like it moved along so slowly.

One of the more creepy parts of the book was at the very end when the narrator starts talking about hidden desires. "I spend more time with my students. At times it seems that I think of them as sexual creatures more often than I did in the past." "If you could look to the bottom of a human being, what desires would you find? And what desires are concealed beneath my white shirt and bow tie, my civilized veneer?" Then, this is turned on the reader: "What do you do with your fear? And do you dream?" It is a great way to end the book because it is suggesting that we are all a little crazy inside. We are just able to hide it and control it.

For now.