Break the Bones, Haunt the Bones by Micah Dean Hicks Book Nerd Tour & #giveaway @JeanBookNerd @MicahDeanHicks @TTCBooksandmore ~ '

Hardcover: 304 pages

Publisher: John Joseph Adams/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (February 5, 2019)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 1328566455

ISBN-13: 978-1328566454

Praise for BREAK THE BODIES, HAUNT THE BONES

“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

“Hicks’ debut novel is a thoughtful tour of the rotted and haunted heart of America. Highly recommended.” ―Jeremiah Tolbert, Shirley Jackson Award-nominated author

“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. Hicks’ mesmerizing imagery kept me turning the pages and asking myself ‘How is this book happening? What sort of literary witchcraft am I witnessing?’” ―Maurice Broaddus, author of Buffalo Soldier and The Usual Suspects

“BREAK THE BODIES, HAUNT THE BONES is a breathless wonder of a debut novel… 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

“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.” ―Chris L. Terry, author of Black Card and Zero Fade

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.

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What was your writing process for this story?

My novel Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones was at least three different books in the six years between when I began writing it and when it was published.

At the beginning, I didn’t think I was writing a novel at all. The book started as a collection of short stories that all took place in the same town. Each story featured a different character, most of them kids with some strange power. The idea was that each story would stand alone, but that together they would add up to something more.

It didn’t work out. The stories referenced one another too much to be read independently, but when added together there wasn’t enough of an overarching story. What I had made was a wild, imaginative mess.

After thinking about the characters and town, I changed my idea of what the story would be about. I threw away the entire manuscript and began again, starting with a blank page, writing it this time as a novel. This version of the story worked a lot better. I found a great agent who loved the book and sent it out to publishing houses.

But the novel didn’t sell. In hindsight, I realized that a lot of the baggage from its earlier life as a story collection was still there. I had an enormous number of point-of-view characters. It didn’t have the right structure for a novel, the plot choppy and sagging in places. And the various supernatural elements weren’t fitting together seamlessly enough.

After getting more feedback and considering how I could have written it differently, I realized that the book would be stronger if it had more focus. So once again, I threw the whole thing away, not keeping a single sentence. I smashed together characters, completely restructured the plot, and narrowed the story’s field of view to a single family.

Anyone who has read my book might be surprised to learn that the major conceit—almost everyone and everything in Swine Hill is haunted, the ghosts afflicting people with strange curses and double-edged gifts—wasn’t a part of the book until this third draft. The ghosts gave me a way to unify all the supernatural elements, to show that the strangeness had a single source, an answer for why this town was so odd. They also helped answer a question early readers of the book kept asking: “If this town is so cursed, why don’t people just leave?”

Leaving Swine Hill is hard because people know their ghosts so intimately. The dead may cause them pain, may reduce their lives to utter ruin, but these ghosts are their friends, their family, in some cases a reflection of themselves. Leaving behind their ghosts would mean leaving behind their sense of who they are.

I don’t know how many rounds of line edits and major revisions there were in addition to the three completely different books I had to write to get here. But all of those pieces added so much texture and weight. The story of Jane and Henry, while narrow and focused, plays out against a setting that feels dense, as heavy with the past as the broken downtown where ghosts still rage and plead for their old lives.

When you hold a copy of Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones, imagine it haunted by all those other books lying inside it, the more than one thousand pages that had to die to create the three hundred that survived. I hope you’ll feel the weight of those ghosts.

Photo Credit: Scot Lerner 2018

Micah Dean Hicks is the author of the novel Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones. He is also the author of Electricity and Other Dreams, a collection of dark fairy tales and bizarre fables. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Hicks grew up in rural southwest Arkansas and now lives in Orlando. He teaches creative writing at the University of Central Florida.

WEBSITE: https://micahdeanhicks.com/

TWITTER: @MicahDeanHicks

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