The Church of the Dead Girls

The Church of Dead Girls is Stephen Dobyns's 1997 standalone literary thriller, set in the fictional upstate New York town of Aurelius and narrated by a high school biology teacher watching his community lose its mind. Three teenage girls disappear in succession over the course of a year. There are no answers and no bodies. The town starts to suspect itself, the teacher starts to suspect his neighbors, and the prose stays steady while everything else comes apart.

Dobyns is a poet by training and the novel reads like one. The narrator is detached, observational, occasionally cruel. The Aurelius of the book is a fully realized small-town America that almost no other thriller has bothered to render at this level of detail: the church basement politics, the cross-country running coach, the convenience-store clerk, the small bureaucratic rituals of grief. The reveal in the final chapters is uncomfortable in the way most thrillers do not bother to be.

Recommended for fans of literary thrillers (Donna Tartt's The Secret History, Megan Abbott's Dare Me) and for readers looking for books like The Church of Dead Girls in the small-town-loses-itself subgenre (Joyce Carol Oates's We Were the Mulvaneys, Russell Banks's Affliction). Four stars and one of the most underread literary crime novels of the 1990s.