| thrill out |
BY CHARLES TAYLOR | You're not likely to feel that you're slumming while reading Stephen Dobyns' "The Church of Dead Girls." This thriller, about a small town in upstate New York thrown into a tizzy when three teenage girls disappear, goes for a quiet but steadily escalating atmosphere of pervasive unease. Dobyns tells the story in the voice of an unnamed, middle-aged high-school biology teacher, a man whose private, almost reclusive life makes him perfectly suited to observing his fellow citizens. He's incisive without being cruel. Dobyns conveys a sense of how people who realize they don't fit in place restraints on their personalities in small communities. And he's first-rate at capturing the way a small town's insularity becomes a dangerous sense of its own superiority. If you've spent any time in an Eastern suburban village far enough away from a city to feel remote from urban life, Dobyns' long description of the fictional Aurelius is liable to set off bells of recognition in your head: "The library is adequate and can get books from the larger library in Potterville ... The opera house hasn't had a show since 'L'il Abner' in 1958. One often hears about plans for renovation, but they never come to anything ... The big hotel in the center of town burned while I was away at college in Buffalo in the 1960s. Now there is a small Key Bank on the location. We have two Italian restaurants, plus a McDonald's, a Dunkin' Donuts, and a Pizza Hut. The bookstore, Dunratty's, has gradually become a gift and stationery store, but they will order books for you ... The mixture of the stately and the shoddy gives our downtown an ambivalent quality and there are always empty buildings for sale."
Dobyns (a poet as well as the author of the Saratoga Mystery series), writes prose that's craftsmanlike without being fussy, measured without being stodgy, creepy without being garish (even though he does kill off a dog). In other words, he's stranded his book in commendable, unsatisfying middle-ground, too literate to be trashy, too schematic to work as what, for want of a better phrase, are called "serious" novels. Dobyns has the country's current conservatism in his head as certainly as Shirley Jackson had McCarthyism in hers when she wrote "The Lottery." Given the frenzy that communities have been thrown into by phony child sexual-abuse scares, that's not a bad instinct. Dobyns' detailing of how a small town might turn on itself in fear and suspicion is consistently plausible. But it's not ambiguous enough. The killer's motive arises, predictably, from the dark side we all keep hidden, and the other characters aren't richly imagined enough to resonate. Give Dobyns some credit, though. Civics lessons aren't usually this compelling.
Charles Taylor is a regular contributor to Salon. Next - - -> |
