My parents encouraged reading, and my mother made sure I got books to the best of our ability to afford them or borrow from the library. I got a bunch through the Weekly Reader Book Club, including ones I remember parts of vividly but can’t begin to remember the names of. Funny how you internalize what you read - or I do - as if it had been part of your own experience.

One that was a gift, and perhaps not in my usual genres, was The Thing in B3 (using this link because it has good pictures of the book). It had to do with a phantom dead body in a drawer in a morgue where the kid… worked helping out, maybe? Or happened to be for some other reason? As I recall, it was an avoidably prescient manifestation, resolved and thus avoided after the interim drama that makes the story a story rather than a couple explanatory sentences.

It was by no means my favorite book as a kid, yet it stuck with me at some level. Guess that says something about it. Or about me.