The Day The Children Vanished – Hugh Pentecost

A school bus, along with nine school age children and their bus driver disappear from a stretch of road into thin air, leaving no witnesses, and no clues. The search for the missing, the scrutiny of people in the community who might be involved, and the suspense of the race against time that is always a factor in a kidnapping, make for a solid novel from Hugh Pentecost. The Day the Children Vanished existed as a short story for eighteen years before the widely publicized 1976 Chowchilla California school bus kidnapping. The plot of the story, and the actual kidnapping are superficially similar, and what, if any, influence the story had in motivating the real kidnappers was questioned. Any influence was ruled out, as the kidnappers reportedly had no knowledge of the short story before planning the real kidnapping. It is though, striking that Hugh Pentecost’s imagination was authentic enough to have been, at least in some measure, prophetic. The book version of The Day the Children Vanished was published a few months after the real kidnapping… probably to take advantage of the publicity generated by the actual kidnapping.

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