Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones, Paperback

" T]his novel is extraordinary . . . It is Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, mixed with H. G. Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau, set in the creepiest screwed-up town since 'Salem's Lot . . . A] major achievement." -- Adam-Troy Castro, Sci Fi magazine

Swine Hill was full of the dead. Their ghosts were thickest near the abandoned downtown, where so many of the town's hopes had died generation by generation. They lingered in the places that mattered to them, and people avoided those streets, locked those doors, stopped going into those rooms . . . They could hurt you. Worse, they could change you.

Jane is haunted. Since she was a child, she has carried a ghost girl that feeds on the secrets and fears of everyone around her, whispering to Jane what they are thinking and feeling, even when she doesn't want to know. Henry, Jane's brother, is ridden by a genius ghost that forces him to build strange and dangerous machines. Their mother is possessed by a lonely spirit that burns anyone she touches. In Swine Hill, a place of defeat and depletion, there are more dead than living.

When new arrivals begin scoring precious jobs at the last factory in town, both the living and the dead are furious. This insult on the end of a long economic decline sparks a conflagration. Buffeted by rage on all sides, Jane must find a way to save her haunted family and escape the town before it kills them.

MICAH DEAN HICKS is the author of the story collection Electricity and Other Dreams, winner of the 2012 New American Fiction Prize. He has also received the Calvino Prize, the Arts & Letters Prize, and the Wabash Prize. He teaches creative writing at the University of Central Florida in Orlando.