Evergreen Cemetery

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Evergreen Cemetery: My Inspiration for The Missing Novella

Dr. John Reizer

As a young boy growing up in Lakewood, New Jersey, in the 1960s and 1970s, I had a pretty amazing childhood. I was fortunate to have picked some great parents for this incarnation.

I grew up in a town filled with pine trees, a community where the wealthy elites like Rockefeller and Gould held estates.

My grandmother used to take me regularly to play on the Rockefeller property, which was converted into Ocean County Park years later. She would tell me how great a man John D. Rockefeller was.

Well, NANA, as it turns out, old Rocky might have been part lizard and not such a great role model after all. 🤣 But I did enjoy my time there with you, swinging on the swings and feeding bread to all the ducks.

What frightened me the most in my early childhood was the cemetery that loomed at the end of the dead-end street I grew up on.

I remember it well. I often rode my bike up there with my three closest early childhood friends, the Auerbach girls: Ginny, Donna, and Dee. We lived on Spruce Street, a long, wooded stretch of asphalt that led to the entranceway of Evergreen Cemetery.

I convinced those three girls on many occasions to play endless hours of baseball, basketball, football, and kickball games with me. When you’re a young boy growing up on a street where the only kids your age are girls, your best friends become girls. And make no mistake about it, they were my best friends.

We also liked to ride our bicycles up to the creepy iron gates that led into Evergreen Cemetery.

I can’t remember how often we went to that cemetery during my childhood, sometimes on bikes and sometimes on foot, but I know it was often.

Many times, we would walk into the woods to bypass the iron gates at the property’s entrance and venture up the long, stony hill leading to the gravesites.

From the highest point of the cemetery, you could see for many miles. And if you stood on one of the tallest gravestones at the back of the property, you could see the Atlantic Ocean. At least, that’s what the neighborhood kids believed.

I spent many days in my early childhood thinking about that cemetery property and have fond memories growing up there on Spruce Street.

Looking back on it all brings a smile to my face. It was a special time when electronic devices were not around distracting you from the more important things in your life, like breaking into a private cemetery.

My latest novella, THE MISSING, is partly inspired by those amazing times in my early childhood. I spent more than a few Halloween evenings inside Evergreen Cemetery looking for ghosts and other strange phenomena with those Auerbach girls. I miss them and all the great times we shared.

After returning home from winning the 1975 Little League Baseball World Series, the neighbors on Spruce Street hung a sign and posed for a picture with me. Donna and Dee are just to my right, and Ginny Auerbach is pictured crouching on the left in front.

A New Novella

From the author of The Target List novel

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The Missing

By John Reizer

Where death is just the beginning.

In the heart of a quiet town lies Evergreen Cemetery—an eerie resting place where no bodies are buried, only empty caskets, each holding a dark secret.

Beneath the surface of this unassuming plot of land is a twisted conspiracy engineered by Trucient Industries, a powerful biomedical corporation with a terrifying agenda.

Trucient’s public mission statement is simple enough: freeze the dead and revive them in the future through cryonics. But the truth is far different. Behind the benevolent façade of preserving life, Trucient is secretly harvesting organs from the homeless, the forgotten, and society’s outcasts, selling them to the highest bidder. But that’s only the beginning. Their true, audacious goal is to map the human brain, digitize it, and create a fully conscious artificial intelligence that could reshape humanity.

When a young private investigator named Jessica Harris meets Billy Hayes, a groundskeeper at Evergreen who has witnessed mysterious happenings on the property, the two team up and discover a hidden operation; they soon become entangled in a web of lies and danger. Will they expose the truth—or become just another pair of missing souls claimed by Trucient’s vision for the future?

The Missing is a chilling tale of power, technology, and the price of immortality. Secrets lurk in the shadows, and no one is truly safe. Not even the dead!