Synopses & Reviews
One by one, three young girls vanish in a small town in upstate New York. With the first disappearance, the towns-people begin to mistrust outsiders. When the second girl goes missing, neighbors and childhood friends start to eye each other warily. And with the third disappearance, the sleepy little town awakens to a full-blown nightmare. In The Church of Dead Girls, Stephen Dobyns probes the ruinous effects of suspicion. As panic mounts and citizens take the law into their own hands, no one is immune as old rumors, old angers, and old hungers come to the surface to reveal the secret history of this seemingly genteel town and the dark impulses of its inhabitants.
Review
"If ever there was a tale for a moonless night, a high wind, and a creaking floor, this is it....Very rich, very scary, very satisfying." Stephen King
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"[A] masterful psychological thriller....Dobyns brilliantly chronicles the gradual ripping away of all trust and familiarity within the community....[A] story full of brilliant touches..." Publishers Weekly
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"An incredibly haunting thriller." Redbook
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"Dobyns's complex parable of social disintegration...fits more into the naturalist mode as if Theodore Dreiser had written The Lodger, or a closet serial killer had turned up in Thornton Wilder's Grover's Corners." David Walton, The New York Times Book Review
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"A vivid and deeply scary tale...that ultimately becomes too relentless: Dobyns needs to follow Poe's lead rather than Stephen King's and save the scariest bits for the end." Kirkus Reviews
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"A riveting page-turner." Newsday
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"[A] dark, cerebral thriller....Dobyns offers probing portraits of a host of the town's residents....An unusually thoughtful psychological thriller." Joanne Wilkinson, Booklist
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"A macabre version of Our Town....Dobyns's characters are superb and his sly arrows at bullies and bigots are right on target." The Washington Post Book World
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"Tantalizingly sinister....Dobyns hooks us from the very first sentence." People
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"Dobyns delivers the goods....An intelligent and literate thriller that provides a burst of terror and plenty to contemplate long after we've regrettably turned the final page." San Francisco Chronicle
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"Stay as calm as you can, The Church of Dead Girls will carry you away." Mirabella
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"Stephen Dobyn's The Church of Dead Girls is that rare thing a genuine thriller that transcends its genre. You'll read it with equal parts curiosity, dread, and wonder." Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls
Synopsis
For decades, the faded, rural upstate New York village has lain dormant--until it is startlingly stirred to life wen, one by one, three young girls vanish...
Nightmare are turned into horrifying reality when their corpses are found, brutally murdered, each missing their left hand...
Now, as the search for a madman gets underway, suspicion shrouds the quiet streets of Aurelius when its residents soon realize that monster lives amongst them...
But no even prayers can save their loved ones from the rage of a twisted mind who has only just begun his slaughter...
About the Author
Stephen Dobyns is the author of nineteen novels, nine collections of poetry, and the best-selling "Saratoga" mystery series. Briefly a reporter for
The Detroit News, Dobyns has been a professor of English, creative writing, and poetry since 1968 and has taught at Syracuse University, the University of Iowa, and Brandeis University, among others. He lives in Boston with his wife and three children.