On the Day I Died (review)

Mike Kowalski figures his parents will forgive his broken curfew if he takes the time to give a ride to a girl in distress who flags him down on the road. The classic vanishing-hitchhiker setup naturally leads Mike to the graveyard, where a host of ghosts who died in their teens cajole Mike into staying to hear their stories. The nine tales cover more than a century, from the mirror that devoured a snobby sister and her jealous twin at the Columbian Exhibition of 1893, to a young photographer who fatally disturbed the ghosts of inmates in the ruins of an insane asylum in 2012. While the chronology skips around, the intensity of the stories builds subtly, just as an evening's worth of ghost stories should. Attaching the stories to sites in the Chicagoland area adds an aura of veracity, and the historical periods are often cleverly pertinent to the tales, especially the setting of a 1930s funeral home and the hood ornament from hell in a 1980s junkyard in northwest Indiana. Fleming's closing notes on each tale are as involving as the stories themselves, commenting on the sources (some specific, some inspirational) for each. Graduates of San Souci's Dare to Be Scared series will welcome this fresh title, as will teachers looking for middle-school readalouds for the run up to Halloween.