Fear of Monsters Makes Monsters

Stephen Dobyns’s Church Of Dead Girls is not a novel I’ve heard of.  And after being forced to read it, I realize it’s not a novel I would’ve read of my own volition.  Other than the first few pages, the novel lacks any real scenes until well over three fourths of the book.  But after finishing the novel, I'm so glad I did.  

The story is told through the “tellings” (and I mean “tellings.”  Dobyns is proof that the idiom “show, don’t tell” is a flimsy rule at best.  And it’s a rule that’s meant to be broken) of a high school biology teacher who we know very little about.  Instead, the narrator informs us of everyone else in the town at great detail.  Most chapters, especially the first hundred or so pages, are character bios.  We learn character histories, friendships, courtships, all of which fleshes out Aurelius, NY to be a living, breathing place.  The town’s description is given briefly in the opening pages but through each exploration of the various residents, Dobyns is really fleshing out the small town of Aurelius until the town itself becomes a character of its own. 

The story, while told through gossip the biology teacher has picked up, focuses on the disappearance and murders of three teenage girls.  The murders are committed by an individual, a “monster,” who preys on young females.  But what Dobyns sets up is a dynamic in which the town itself is nearly just as bad as the monster that it bred.  The town is small, sheltered.  To Aurelius, the problems and issues of the outside world are just that: outside.  Outsiders aren’t trusted.  The people are, to use Chihani’s word, “ignorant.”  And it could be due to this ignorance, this “group thinking” a sheltered environment breeds, that create a monster as real as the one in flesh and blood. 

The first murder of the book (Janice) occurs years before the disappearance of the three girls.  But after this murder goes unsolved, the town turns their back on it.  They are so comfortable in their ways, they almost refuse to acknowledge that it occurred after a time.  It’s only when a young girl disappears, and then two more, that the town is forced to recognize what is happening.  And like mob-rule, they turn to outsiders first.  This is really when Aurelius, the character, shows her fangs.  This is demonstrated in the persecution, and eventual death, of Chihani.  Ironically, it is the town’s ignorance that kills Chihani.  The person of Aurelius is born, with each resident acting as a single synapse in the cognitive network.  The same goes for Paul Leimbach.  The police, while against mob-rule, are few in number and essentially powerless to stop the riotous Aurelius from lashing out in anger.  The Friends go on a witch-hunt in which any they claim are guilty, are guilty until proven innocent.  Even when the killer is discovered to be Donald Malloy, the town still defends the men who attacked and destroyed Leimbach’s house – a man who was wrongfully accused and attacked.  The narrator states that they claimed, “they were in the right.”  Aurelius had deemed him guilty, even for a few short moments, and therefore he will always remain guilty in her eyes.

But Dobyns doesn’t end it with the death of the killer.  That would be logical.  That would be easy.  Instead, he takes it a step further.  He goes on about how the mistrustful, riotous Aurelius character will always remain inside its residents, its synapses, even after the “monster” is dead.  Or even after they leave.  We discover that the monster is never truly dead to those that lived through it.  The town has experienced and done things it can’t undo.  The residents will forever remain distrustful of each other.  Their sense of oneness is shattered.  Their own, someone they trusted, had turned out to be a monster.  And in the closing lines, our nice biology teacher of a narrator exposes himself to be a bit on the monstrous side as well.  Donald Malloy had taken the left hands of every victim, including himself.  The narrator confesses that he took Malloy’s hand from the funeral home and places it among his own specimens.  And in this confession, Dobyns leaves us with a chilling notion that in perhaps destroying monsters, its not a far leap to become one yourself:  

“For me it’s a reminder of what is always there, of the longings that lie within people, the longings we hide within ourselves…I think of it as my private teacher…I try to think what those fingers felt and I scare myself: the necks of the tree girls, their tenderness” (Dobyns 388).