HERE LIES THE BODY

With his usual talent for mixing easy humor, mild chills and smoothly paced action, Corbett takes readers back a generation or so to the small town world of two brothers, the eleven-year-old narrator and his fifteen-year-old ""poet"" brother Mitch, who get summer jobs cutting the cemetery grass and end up witnesses to supernatural deviltry -- performed not by any corpses whose plots they tend but by the ancient Yankee Zenger brothers who manage the Hemlock Hill Burial Grounds. It's enough to scare Mitch out of completing his alphabet of macabre couplets based on names of the graveyard occupants, but his earlier examples (such as ""Here lies the body of Dudley Duff,/ Lightning struck twice, though once was enough"")may well inspire readers to fill in the Z (for Zenger) on their own.