Death is the unifying theme of four children’s stories released this month by Inverness author Jeff Hickey. 

The short collection is intended for middle schoolers and up. “It is about death within the presence of life,” he said. “Life goes on, life is all around us, and yet…death happens all the time.”

Mr. Hickey worked as a children’s storyteller for about a decade beginning in 1990, mostly in the Bay Area though he also traveled across the country.  In the mid-90s, as he was considering his next writing project, his mother died suddenly. Her passing directly informed one of the stories, a short piece called “The Shade of a Tree in the Light.” And since his kids were around nine or ten years old at the time, he also wanted to write stories that would appeal to them and their friends.

“I wanted to create a spooky story collection that wasn’t typical. I wanted it to be more subtle, more diffuse,” he said.

Mr. Hickey released a C.D. of the stories in 1997, though it was not widely sold. It was mostly a vanity project for me and my kids and their friends,” he said with a laugh. He has also performed the stories at various events over the years.

The audio version features Mr. Hickey reading the tales, accompanied by music and sound effects. Rumbling thunder and bird calls accent a score that includes synthesizer, percussion, and his wife, Karen, playing the penny whistle.

The release also features a physical book, which Mr. Hickey self-published with the assistance from the company CreateSpace. The scored audio tales are also newly available for purchase online. 

The four stories in the book are “Tillamook Rock,” “Eye on Five,” “The Shade of a Tree in the Light” and “The Barbershop.”

Tillamook Rock is inspired by the construction of the Tillamook Lighthouse, on a rock off the Oregon coast, and the wreck of the ship Lupatia in 1881. 

In the audio version, the instrumentation begins bucolically but later turns dark. The thunder of a storm crashes and Mr. Hickey switches from a distant modern narrator to one of the immigrants who worked on the shop. The lighthouse, which was decommissioned decades ago, was critical to steering ships at sea to safety, but its construction was a perilous task that claimed lives. 

“At night, the voices of the dead mingled with the voices of the living as each clung to the rocks like barnacles,” Mr. Hickey’s Irish character warns.

In Eye on Five, Mr. Hickey adopts a southern twang to narrate the brief story of a man, driving for hours along the highway, who sees something in his rearview mirror. “Something was swirling around his car leaving a sort of vapor trail, a mist, a path,” the narrator says. 

The Barbershop is the longest story, with the audio version clocking in at 30 minutes. The narrator recollects his hometown barbershop, a place of camaraderie for the men of the town—though occasionally a sinister old man with wiry gray hair came around, never speaking but often appearing before someone’s death.

Mr. Hickey’s tales have one common thread: tapping into the frightening, mysterious belly of death while also showing his characters—dead souls lost at sea, or a longtime barber watching his business slowly dwindle—accept or find solace in the approaching ending. 

In Tillamook Rock, a motley crew of ghostly workers sail off together into the Pacific—seven whose bodies were found, four who remained lost at sea and a dog that survived. The narrator of The Shade peacefully watches his spectral mother fade away. In The Barbershop, the main character says near the end that the shop has shown him a few things. “I have seen the future. The future has a name. That name is death, and he’s not such a bad boy.”

Bats and Bones is available in print on Amazon. The audio version is available on audible.com and iTunes.

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