“This book doesn’t make a bit of sense.
We start off with a cement mixer who is driving home after work. This is not only strange because…where does a truck live? If there’s no guy driving the truck, couldn’t it just sleep at the construction site? But it’s also strange because the truck is headed through what’s clearly a drug-ravaged neighborhood.
The truck gets a flat, then heads into a junkyard and comes across a golden tire laying in the middle of the floor.
This is why I spent an embarrassing amount of time searching for the title of this book. Was it a golden tire? The Haunted Tire?
Why was a golden tire just sitting there? And why did this jerk cement mixer cruise into a junkyard and say, “It’s the middle of the night. I need a tire. I know, I’ll just take this clearly-mystical one”? What the hell? Hasn’t this guy ever seen that Indiana Jones movie where he drinks out of the crappy cup?
So Cementy (I don’t know if that’s his name, but it’s shorter than “The Cement Mixer” or “This Jerk Cement Mixer”) takes the tire and drives off. After which someone says, “Whoooo stole my tire?”
Now, as ghosts go, I have to say this one is pretty fair. The truck DID steal the tire. This isn’t one of those ghost stories where someone accidentally steals some amulet that’s sitting next to a well and then is subjected to complete torture. Or a Freddy movie or something where Freddy was killed, for being a pederast, and then he comes back to get his revenge. You know, it just seems like Freddy is asking a bit much. Also, I like how the parents in the first movie are like, “No, how do you know that name? There’s no such thing as a Freddy.” And then later they’re like, “Okay. So we completely lied. There was a Freddy, and we kind of shoved him in a furnace. But it’s cool because no one in the world would convict a parent who burned a suspected child abuser alive in fire” [Hint: Actually, yes huh].
Cementy runs to hide, or at least that’s what he says. He goes in his garage. Which seems like a bad hiding place. When hiding, I find that it’s more effective to go somewhere I don’t just normally hang out. Perhaps in a closet as opposed to, I don’t know, napping on the couch.
The garage door opens, and we see what is clearly a truck with a white sheet over it with eyeholes. He says Whooo stole my tire? and Cementy gives up the tire and…runs off? On three wheels?
It turns out that the ghost is actually just some other truck with a sheet on it. And he says, “Geez. Don’t you want the other one?”
Why TWO gold tires instead of four?
Why is this red truck pretending to be a ghost? Is this some character trait I don’t know about? Do these two have a relationship of pranking or something?
What’s spooky about the tire?
I thought this was going to be a much better book that went like this:
Cementy needs a tire. He’s still named Cementy in this version too.
Cementy needs a tire, and he heads into a junkyard which was built, you guessed it, on a graaaaaaveyard. Not an ancient Indian graveyard, but rather a modern Native American burial spot.
Cementy takes what looks like a harmless tire. But what he doesn’t know is that tire belonged to an evil bus that was the most murderous bus of all time. It ran people over all the time, and it liked how it felt to crush human flesh and bones under his treads.
Of course, the evil bus was captured and put to death, and his perfectly-good parts were pieced out.
And now, as Cementy gets used to his new tire, he starts having visions and urges. Why does this new tire make him want to kill? Why does he know what human flesh feels like under his wheels?
Anyway, it’s pretty hard to rate a book once you kind of have your own expectations. So I’m prepared to acknowledge there’s an issue there.”