The Empty Lot Next Door

The First Edition is no longer available.

Do you like true-life ghost stories? If so, the award-winning memoir, The Empty Lot Next Door, will awaken your innermost nightmare and scare you senseless!

Whether or not you believe in ghosts, the true-life experience of Arthur Mills deserves consideration. Find out who Candle Face was, her taunting behavior, and how she turned a boy's childhood into a living nightmare in The Empty Lot Next Door.

In a South Austin neighborhood, Ray (Arthur's childhood name) and his family excitedly moves into a small house standing in the midst of a big, green lawn. Beside their house is a strange, vacant lot where a house apparently once stood and where a huge wide hole in the back lays mysteriously. As a young boy with a lot of new friends, Ray considers the empty lot as an exciting playground. But the tale behind the lot keeps the boy intrigued and frightened as he learns that the house that was once there was burned down years ago, leaving a girl dead amid the fire. The little girl, as the neighborhood kids say, comes out in the night to regain her life. Determined to validate the authenticity of this tale, Ray daringly and mistakenly challenges the ghost, a challenge that he would forever regret. Soon, he becomes haunted by the little girl, whom he named Candle Face, visiting his dreams and leaving handprints and other signs even when he is awake.

Many years later, Ray, now a military man, commits another mistake by telling his wife about his dark past. Along with the tale of the empty lot, he discloses to her the truth about the circumstances of his brother's suicide and the dreams of torment he and Candle Face bestowed upon him for many years. With the past once again revived, Ray faces another set of nightmares, this time with his loved ones' lives at stake.

Woven with a mind-boggling plot and hair-raising play of words, The Empty Lot Next Door follows Ray in confronting the past to move on to the future. This release, part-memoir, and part-fiction will never fail to hook readers with every turn of the page.

What the critics are saying

Critics agree that The Empty Lot Next Door is a ghost story at its finest, perhaps all the more so because it's a true story. Professional book critic Lisa McCurley says, "After the first night of sleeping with the light on, I ended up taking off two afternoons from work to finish it which is all it took because I couldn't put this book down." Kirkus Reviews agrees, "In a coming-of-age story that's well paced and layered with emotion, Mills creates moments of true suspense through guileless prose as he unearths a family tragedy." Anyone who enjoys being scared or wants to probe into whether ghosts are real will add The Empty Lot Next Door to the "must-read" list.

When Arthur Mills wrote The Empty Lot Next Door, some neighbors and even family quit speaking to him; they didn't want to acknowledge the local element of his true-life story of ghosts, suicide, and bullying, but that didn't stop his new book from winning awards.

• Kids Award for Best Teen / Young Adult Book of the Year
• Teen (12-16) - First Place
• Regional South - First Place
• Parenting, Family, and Relationships - Honorable Mention