On the Day I Died: Stories from the Grave

Mike is driving home on a stormy night on a winding country road when a dripping wet girl suddenly appears in his headlights. He stops the car and offers her a ride. Inside the car, she removes her saddle shoes and places them on the floorboard. After dropping her off, Mike discovers that her shoes are still in the car. When he attempts to return them, he is met at the door by an elderly lady who tells him this happens every year on the anniversary of her daughter’s death. If he really wants to return the shoes, she says, he must go to the cemetery just up the road. At the gravesite, he discovers a moldering mound of old saddle shoes and soon is encircled by a group of disparate apparitions, all teenagers intent on describing for him the bizarre circumstances of their deaths. So begins the parade of nine other spooky tales (Schwartz & Wade, 2012) by Candace Fleming, each from a different time period from the 1860s to the present, and all of them set in the Chicago area. Mixed in with the more standard fare for this genre are a few truly scary stories, and one kitschy piece that’s a takeoff on The Blob. There is a different narrator for each tale, with mixed results. Still, this will make for frightfully good listening.–Cary Frostick, Mary Riley Styles Public Library, Falls Church, VA