Church of Dead Girls

This week I read an interesting story called Church of Dead Girls by Stephen Dobyns. I had a love hate relationship with this book. First off, I loved the story and the reveal at the end. There were elements that I adored such as the narrator’s collection. There were also parts of this story I did not like.

There were many characters and unnecessary details that forced me to process the story more carefully than I normally read. This made me realize that I am guilty of some of these things in my own writing. Good examples for me to study.

As I read this book, I had to slow my reading pace and take some notes to keep track of things like characters and places. I am not good with names to begin with, and I tend to mix characters up when there are many of them. About halfway through I switched to the audiobook version, and I was able to enjoy the story much more from that point.

This story, especially at the beginning was one huge Info dump. I felt myself slipping as I was reading at the beginning. When the narrator walked me through the description of the town and the towns people, my eyes were glassing and rolling back in my head.

The story, although entertaining with a cool reveal at the end was filled with way too much telling of information. This forced me to actually fight to continue reading but I am glad I did. If I were reading this story on my own and not for a school assignment, I do not know if I would have pushed through the beginning to get to the great ending. I might have shelved it for another time when I have nothing else to read.

As the narrator revealed himself throughout the story, I felt tension as I read. I thought for sure that the narrator was the killer for most of the story. I viewed him as an unreliable narrator. In the end, as the story unfolded, I found that this was not the case.

There was a cool bonus for this narrator/character was his creepy collection of goodies in jars. Now, that is my kind of teacher. I think I could love being a student in one of his classes.

Quick question for Scott…do you have such a collection? If so, what goodies do you have stored in jars? Anything you want to talk about? Enquiring minds want to know... Hee hee!