The Monsters Are Us

Although I have not yet read my classmates’ blogs about this book, knowing the Seton Hill University mantra of “show, don’t tell” I feel certain at least one person remarked on the fact that a large part of the narration in this book is “telling” and not showing. While most of the time I agree that it is much more effective to show the narration, in this particular instance, I think the telling technique that Stephen Dobyns employs in The Church of the Dead Girls was used quite effectively to actualize the theme of the novel.

The Church of Dead Girls is told in first person point-of-view by a narrator who is on the periphery of the action, much like Nick Carraway from The Great Gatsby. The “telling” of the narrative is used as a way to convey information after-the-fact that is not available to the first person narrator at the time of the action. The question, then, is why use this periphery character as the first person narrator? Why not use third person point of view? Or why not use a character closer to the action of the story? Maybe Franklin, or Ryan?

I believe the point of using the periphery character is to create an unreliable narrator that allows a sense of ambiguity. In this way, the reader experiences the story the same way a member of the community would have experienced it, through the gossip and rumors and second-hand knowledge that spreads fear and suspicion through a small town in this kind of crisis. We need to see the unreliable-ness of it all to understand how things can spin so totally out of control. This story is not so much about the “psycho” who is abducting and killing the girls as it is about the “psycho” that fear and suspicion bring out in all of us. It reminds me of the old Twilight Zone episode “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” where aliens attempting to eradicate the human race realize they can do it easily just by creating fear and suspicion among the humans and letting them kill each other.

This idea of the second-hand story is evident from the first page of the prologue. The narrator describes the crime scene of the attic, and he admits, “I didn’t witness this. I only looked at the photographs my cousin showed me. There were many photographs. And he said the police had a videotape of the entire attic, but I never saw it.” Here, in the 2^nd paragraph of the story, we already see the theme of second-hand knowledge.

Later, this theme expands to include the damage of secrets, suspicions, and misinformation. Page 101 states this theme clearly:

I often wish that people had little screens in their chests, small television monitors, that you could flick on and see the interior lives within. I don’t mean blood pumping and lungs flexing, but what they think and worry about and love. Because otherwise it is all speculation and observing their actions, then coming up with a few possibilities that one tries to shift into the realm of probabilities.

This is what the entire novel does. As a result of “hearing” the story “told” to us through the word-of-mouth pieces of information from the periphery character, everything we know of the story is “speculation” that someone is trying to “shift into the realm of probabilities.”

What’s really interesting, though, is that while the novel may not “show” a lot of the action of the story, the use of the second-hand telling through the periphery first-person narrator shows us precisely how fear and suspicion is created by our inability to really know anyone. Yet, through the flashes of insight we get into the narrator’s mind, it also shows us that we really don’t want to see the interior of people’s lives.

Part 2 begins: “Just as we are only aware of the surface parts of one another’s minds, so are we only aware of the surface parts of one another’s behavior. We see the polite part, the public part, and we can only speculate on what exists underneath” (117). But, how can we ever be sure of what someone really is underneath? As it states at the end of the paragraph, “If the inoffensiveness of one’s public self is created by fear, then it would seem possible that one’s private self could be anything at all” (117). This lack of understanding is demonstrated again and again throughout the novel, yet the remainder of this chapter recounts an incredibly personal story of the narrator’s previous habit of watching his blind teenage neighbor masturbating in front of the window. This account does two things: first, it creates suspicion about the narrator. At this point in the story, like many others in the town would later do, I began to suspect the narrator might be the killer. Second, it makes us uncomfortable with the level of information we now possess about this narrator’s life and habits, proving that no matter how much we say we do, no one really wants to know too much about what goes on in the minds of others.