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Fritz Agency
Christian Dittus
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English
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BREAK THE BODIES, HAUNT THE BONES

Micah Dean Hicks

Almost everyone in Swine Hill is haunted. Jane Walker's ghost tells her what everyone around her is thinking, even when she doesn't want to know. The lonely spirit possessing her mother burns anyone she touches. Her brother Henry's genius ghost forces him to build strange and dangerous machines. When unnatural beastmen begin to appear in town, taking precious jobs at the pork processing plant and enraging the spirits, Jane knows her brother's ghost has something to do with it. As Swine Hill's violent tide of dead begins tearing the town apart, Jane will have to find a way to save her haunted family and escape the town before it kills her.

BREAK THE BODIES, HAUNT THE BONES is a story about dying American cities, on a sociological scale, and about how each of us carries our own ghosts with us, haunted from within, on a psychological scale. It's cultural commentary that's intimately told and profoundly personal. Most of all, it's smart and funny and deeply weird.

Micah Dean Hicks is an award-winning author of fabulist fiction, with credits including the 2016 Arts & Letters Prize in Fiction, judged by Kate Christensen; the Wabash Prize, judged by Kelly Link; and the Calvino Prize, judged by Robert Coover. Micah's additional work has appeared in The New York Times, Kenyon Review, Epoch, and New Letters, among others. He teaches creative writing at the University of Central Florida.
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Published by John Joseph Adams Books / HMH

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Recipient of the 2020 Creative Writing Fellowship grants from the National Endowment for the Arts Read more...

In BREAK THE BODIES, HAUNT THE BONES, Micah Dean Hicks has crafted a haunting story with multi-generational appeal, where the very real horror of poverty meets supernatural horror, and social issues like xenophobia, racism and economic anxiety are addressed organically through allegory and gripping storytelling. I finished this book three nights ago and still feel the chill of Swine Hill in my bones. – Chris L. Terry, author of Black Card and Zero Fade

Wildly atmospheric and unsettling. . . . Hicks, a gifted storyteller, explores the crushing loss of hope and the dark heart of fear. . . . Fans of the macabre will be enthralled.

BREAK THE BODIES, HAUNT THE BONES is a breathless wonder of a debut novel. Amid robots and a city of pigs and residents haunted by their own personal ghosts, Micah Dean Hicks explores economic uncertainty, the violence of bigotry and hate, and the tremendous weight of the past. In Swine Hill, no one escapes the horrors of grief. And yet this is a novel infused with hope, and with the most gorgeous sentences evoking the sublime wonder of this world. Hicks is a magician with words and has written a spellbinding, haunting and necessary book." – Anne Valente, author of Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down and Dzanc Short Story Collection Prize winner By Light We Knew Our Names

A tour-de-force of the imagination. Hicks has created a world that is beautifully and brutally surreal and yet, at the same time, BREAK THE BODIES, HAUNT THE BONES stands as a hyper-realistic psychological portrait of the death of the American factory town. My own identity as an American was disturbed and changed by this novel; some dormant understanding was shaken awake. This is a stunning and profound debut. – Julianna Baggott, bestselling author of New York Times Notable Book Pure

Daring readers with a hunger for the arcane and the New Weird style of writers like China Miéville will enjoy this singularly strange novel.

I can't stop thinking about this book. It's a haunting story that burrows under your skin like an insect laying eggs that hatch within you in the middle of the night. Hick's mesmerizing imagery keeps you turning the pages wondering what will happen next. – Maurice Broaddus, author of Buffalo Soldier and The Usual Suspects

Hicks' debut novel is a thoughtful tour of the rotted and haunted heart of America. Highly recommended. – Shirley Jackson Award-nominated author Jeremiah Tolbert