On the Day I Died

On the Day I Died

 (Image via juniorlibraryguide.com)

Cadence Fleming

(Trigger Warnings (book and review): Death, fire, spiders, blood, the undead, murder- Okay, -almost anything that has the potential to kill you was in here. For the love of a Smiling God, do not read if you have basically any triggers.)

Mike is driving fast to get home before he almost hits a dripping wet girl with his car. He slams on the brakes, and, knowing he's already late and the girl is clearly miserable, offers her a ride home. Except her mother says she's dead, and her real home is White Cemetery. Michael's visit there, however, leaves him trapped by the ghosts that need to tell their stories.

I read this book the first time the same year it was published. I didn't have a blog at the time, and my tastes were kind of underdeveloped back then anyway. It became my favorite book. I read again recently and came to some frightening truths about younger me (Why did I feel the need to read about all these deaths? Why was I upset when a cat was mentioned to have died, but not when the narrator died?  What was wrong with me?). It now ranks as 'decent' on my book-o-meter. Let's find out why.

This book is the ultimate exercise of writing different voices. And it succeeded. The characters were all obviously individuals. Heck, it sounded like it could have been different writers writing, even, which I mean in the best way possible.

So, another part of this book is that they died in supernatural ways. A couple, though, went from 'ooooh spppoooookkkkyyyyyyy' to 'wait what'. And the first didn't really even go under the theme of supernatural. Unless there's something I missed there, which is totally possible.

The writing style, while it varied from story to story, was consistently interesting. Or, didn't leave me skipping over paragraphs out of boredom, even in the slowest-building stories. However, the descriptions weren't usually as detailed as I wanted. There was a lot left to the imagination.

An anthology of ten short stories usually means ten different settings. Or, it's in New York. But instead On the Day I Died is set in Chicago, and does that fine. It's not the same story over and over again, it's not even really the same setting over and over again. Way to milk your surroundings. Also in a good way.

Overall, good light reading for creep addicts.

(Sorry for the patheticness of this review, and the fact I missed the 15th...)

~Corinne