Stephen Dobyns

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 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.… (mer)

I read The Burn Palace by this author and while it was quirky it was also a very good story. Is Fat Bob Dead Yet, is also quirky, but that's it. The author will use 3 pages to tell the reader something that could have been communicated in a sentence or at most a paragraph. I made it to page 125 and realized I couldn't care less about the characters or the story. Another annoying thing about this book was the narration, it goes from person to person dialog, then into big picture narration from some third party, I don't know how else to explain it.
Lastly after I got it from Amazon I noticed on the cover that it had- for me- the kiss of death, an endorsement from Stephen King. I like King's books but with 1 or 2 exceptions I have hated any books his endorsement appears on.… (mer)

Dobyns seems to produce two lines of books: his mealticket, the Saratoga Springs mystery novels, and his one-offs, the odd and varied -- but not actually experimental -- novels like Cold Dog Soup and The Two Deaths of Senora Puccini.

Burn Palace seems to combine the two approaches: a semi-supernatural police procedural which unexpectedly veers off into more cerebral territory. There were shades of The Wrestler's Cruel Study in many of the the occult digressions.

It's not perfect, and I admit that I like his one-offs much better, but this was still a fun, diverting read.… (mer)