No, the ‘ghost’ of the piece is almost a spitting image of the ‘Walking Dude’ from Stephen King’s ‘The Stand’. If this were the only problem though I wouldn’t have minded too much. Here’s a tale that’s a little too descriptive for my liking (‘fallen leaves scattered like insects…’ anyone?) this really takes away from the ‘matter of fact’ air that generally comes with true stories. After all, you only have someone else’s word for it… In this instant, I’m thinking of ‘Hat Man on the Montreal Avenue Bridge’ in particular. I’ve also got to wonder how Wilder determined the truth of these tales before they went in the collection. If you explain things in too much detail, where’s the mystery and (ultimately) the chill in the tale? Moments like these cast an awfully big shadow over the rest of the book. What I do know though is that stories like ‘Alien Encounter at Deacon’s Corner Truck Stop’ come across as being more about someone’s chance to expound upon their theories (to a captive audience) rather than tell a genuinely unsettling tale. Is the book aimed at more than one audience or are there just not that many ghosts haunting the highways and byways of America? I don’t know. I also found myself wondering whether Wilder had enough material, to fill the book, when she opened things up to include UFO and alien sightings along with the ghostly trucker stuff. It’s really hard not to feel like you’re reading the same story over and over again. Think about it, trucker ghost stories… Collect them all together and what you have here are dozens of stories that all begin with a variation of ‘I was driving one night’ and end on a variation of ‘I was really scared by the ghostly woman/car that drives itself, I never drove down that road again’. The biggest issue, I thought, was in the subject matter itself and how it (probably quite unwittingly) forms a pattern that gives the book a repetitive feel that verges on the wrong side of hypnotic.

More of a chore than a pleasure then, not a great state of affairs… ‘Trucker Ghost Stories’ is only a very slight two hundred and forty six pages long but I have to say that my journey through it felt like I was reading a book three times the length. I'd normally post some kind of blurb here but the premise of the collection is really simple, 'true tales of ghostly encounters on the highways and byways of America'. Having read it though… I think I might stick with the fiction in future as real life isn’t anywhere near as scary (not if this book is anything to go by). Do you believe in ghosts and things like that? I’m pretty sure that everyone reading this blog does if we didn’t why would we read the books that we do? We all want to believe that this kind of thing really does happen, outside of books, so when I saw ‘Trucker Ghost Stories’ I jumped on it like a shot.

Trucker Ghost Stories by Annie Wilder