This is a ghost story, or more accurately, it is a story about how we live with ghosts. It is the story of Jane and her brother Henry, their mother, their friends and the town of Swine Hill, whose inhabitants live surrounded, and are often possessed, by ghosts. There are more ghosts in Swine Hill than people. A lot more! There are ghosts who haunt the collapsing buildings and houses, the abandoned factories and stores and businesses, the fields and orchards around the slowly dying town. Industries, commercial enterprises, restaurants, shops, malls, retail outlets, schools and churches have closed or are closing; most of the people have already left. Those that remain, like Jane and her family, can’t afford to leave, or else are too beaten-down in their lives to make the attempt, or they are haunted by ghosts and held captive by their supernatural obsessions. The ghosts are of factory workers killed on the job or those who died of cancer or drink or sadness or old age. They haunt the hallways and machinery, the shops and offices, laneways and streets, existing in a twilight world performing the same routines and functions they did when they were alive. They are the ghosts of young and old, of workers and labourers, shopkeepers and clerks, white collar and blue collar—all the dead townspeople of Swine Hill from decades, even centuries past. Often, they inhabit the living, those with whom they share a common sensibility or outlook. Some of the living have so lost their way in life that they welcome being possessed. Some ghosts communicate with their hosts, like Jane’s. Other’s live in the bones, the guts, or muscles, acting instinctually and mechanically, bending the backs and aching the joints and knees of their hosts. Some are helpful. Others are a burden or a curse, even a nightmare.Despair and hopelessness are the very air that the people of Swine Hill breathes every day. The town is decaying, rotting to its foundations; its people have no futures. They are haunted and weighed down by ghosts, caught in a never-ending cycle of ghost-fueled obsessions and desires of their predecessors, most of whom had themselves led lives of desperation and despair. And Hicks is relentless and masterful in his ability to create a vivid landscape and atmosphere for this sad and haunting place.
"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 in those rooms. But you might encounter a ghost unexpectedly—in the high school where Jane had graduated two years ago, curled into the hollow of a tree, hands out and pleading on the side of the road. They could hurt you. Worse, they could change you." (3)
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| Micah Dean Hicks |
Our
main character is Jane, a twenty-year old who works in the town’s one
remaining grocery store. Since her childhood, she has been haunted by the ghost
of a young girl. Her ghost can read people’s minds, and she delights in gossiping
and revealing people’s secrets and private thoughts to Jane. The ghost is Jane’s
constant companion; a burden at times, she can be capricious and petty; at other times, helpful and generous. She knows Jane inside out and often acts as a conscience and a guide. In the end, though, Jane's ghost has her own agenda: she wishes that nothing will ever change in Swine Hill, and that Jane will remain there forever. Jane's ghost must remain in the town, for there is no place else for her to go. Thus Jane, haunted since childhood, is never alone; she has no private thoughts. Yet, she has made a kind of accommodation with her ghost, learning to co-exist with her ever-present spectral 'boarder'. It would be most like living as a co-joined twin, I suppose, with the other knowing all your intimate thoughts and
feelings. At one point, Jane says her ghost even knows her dreams.
Henry, her younger brother, is possessed by a ghost that in life had been a scientific genius, an inventor. He uses Henry’s mind and body to construct robots and repair machinery and electronics, as well as building secret—perhaps harmful, perhaps helpful—inventions. Their mother is possessed by a ghost whose need for love and affirmation is so great that she literally burns with it. Her hot touch often injuries her children, and in desperation she seeks love in the bars and lounges of Swine Hill, imbuing in her lovers an unquenchable need for her and then, within her embrace, she consumes them, literally burning them to a crisp!
It’s not exactly a suitable Goosebumps storyline is it? And though the main characters are teens or in their early twenties, suggesting this is a book in the "Young Adult" catagory, the themes Hicks elaborates on, and the brutal portrait he paints of a "post-industrial" American town, are equally compelling for older readers (and should be thought-provoking as well.)
Initially, I thought Hicks would use his ghost story format for humour or satire (though there is both throughout). I kept expecting Casper the Friendly Ghost, and instead I was given a horror story about a haunted town, where the living live side-by-side with the dead, most of whom are obsessed with activities, events and emotions that once shaped their lives in some significant, or perhaps dreadful, manner. Ghosts inhabit the buildings and streets, the structures and places, even furniture or possessions, or tools—anything that gave their former lives meaning or purpose or, as is more often the case in Swine Hill, had trapped them in lives of apathy, or quiet desperation and struggle. For example, a carpenter’s ghost might inhabit a tool box chucked away and forgotten beneath the basement stairs, buried in the rubble of his ruined house. His ghost might obsessively hammer and saw ghostly planks just as he once did in life, forever building that addition to his house that no longer exists. A streetcar driver might operate a car along a ghostly route, just as she’d done when she was alive. (Henry rides such a ghost car to his high school each day.) It sounds cartoonish, but Hicks' depiction of Swine Hill and its ghostly denizens is so vivid, its decline and decay so detailed, that having ghosts in the mix is not so far-fetched; ghosts are something the reader might expect to see in such a sad and lonely place.
Henry walked out of the school and headed down the cracked and trash-blown streets of downtown. The deeper he pressed into those shattered buildings, the more things moved in the windows or raced eel-like over the ground…An old brick building faced him, its windows blown out and staring like the hollows of a skull…Something big moved in the dark, crawling up a flight of stairs and knocking things over on the next floor. Henry followed the sound, barely able to see. (102-3)
So,
ghosts are real. To be haunted in life is something everyone will experience at
some point, and we should expect to see others who are haunted. From time to time we will live in, or move through, places
we know must have ghosts. We’ll sense a ghostly presence in some of the things
we make or use: in our tools, our homes and buildings, our towns. Ghosts are
things we must learn to live with and come to understand, and it is important we discover how and why they haunt us. Hicks tells us we are all haunted to one degree or another but, in the end we cannot live out our lives with ghosts and expect to change and grow. We cannot remain haunted or allow the ghosts in our lives to dominate us. If we do, we will live a twilight existence, becoming grey ghosts from a faded time. Ghosts are of the dead, the past. And, as cliche and trite as this old nugget sounds: life is for the living!
In Break the Bones, we follow Jane as she negotiates her strange family life, her work and her relationships, and her need to break free from the haunted decay of Swine Hill to find a better life for her and her family. And we witness the results of Henry’s collaboration with his inventor-ghost come to fruition with the arrival of the “pig-people” to Swine Hill. In their months-long secret project, Henry and his ghost create, á la Frankenstein, the imposing figure of “Hogboss”, the new manager of the local branch of the national pork-producer Pig City, the town’s one remaining major employer (hence the town's nickname; originally it was called Swain Hill.*) We learn Henry and his ghost (who controls Henry’s consciousness so the boy is unaware of the its activities) have created a cohort of “pig-people”, that will soon take over the running of the meat-processing plant, replacing all the humans with “self-slaughtering”, intelligent pigs, who, incidentally, all walk upright like people. (They are self-slaughtering in that, when they are no longer able to work, they turn themselves in for processing, suggesting "Pig City" has questionable labour-relations policies!)
Henry
wanted to help the people of his town, who he feels are held 'captive' by the factory that, logically, should have closed long ago. Its closure would force the ex-employees to
finally move out of Swine Hill and make new lives. But the logic of his ghost, in manufacturing the "pig-people" for the boy's well-intentioned purpose, has inadverteltly created what the humans see as essentially a small army of "scab labourers" who will take away their jobs. (The pigs, it should be noted, through no fault of their own, were created by Henry to run the factory; they are unaware of the effect their arrival in Swine Hill will have on its citizens.) This will lead to some difficulties.
Naturally, Henry’s “pig-people” plan backfires, with disastrous and tragic consequences. Henry is killed during riots that break out after Hogboss fires all the humans from the factory. Mayhem ensues, with the pig-people in danger of being slaughtered by mobs of ghost-ridden ex-employees. Henry, now a ghost himself, does what he can to protect his creations. He also aids his sister by fixing her ghost-infested car and providing her with a robot programmed to help her in her new life when she leaves Swine Hill. In the end, Henry accepts that he has done all he can do to help those he loves and cares for; he can do no more—and that’s okay. Jane, too, by the story’s end forgives herself, saying she did all she could to reunite her family, to bring her mother and father together, and though her plans didn’t work out—that, too, is okay. She cannot continue to feel guilty, to be ‘haunted’ for not doing enough. It is true that her parents won’t reunite as she hoped, but each has discovered a way forward in their lives with the help of Jane and her brother. And Henry’s final act is to help his town by drawing away most of its ghosts, allowing those twilight spirits to move on to wherever it is that ghosts go when they leave the places and people they haunt. He does this by directing his robot to fashion a “laser display” that acts as a beacon, attracting the ghosts, like fireflies to a flame, away from Swine Hill and out into space. And there, in a place where they have no history or connections, they can finally rest in peace.
Jane drives away from Swine Hill in her (mostly) ghost-free car. She is alone with only her robot for company, for the ghost she has lived with since childhood is unable to exist beyond the town. She is leaving to start a new life somewhere else. And that is as it should be. Her parents will stay and live in the orchard with the pig-people, helping them negotiate their way in the world. They will live for a time in the gently-haunted orchards on the outskirts of Swine Hill, in a place that must seem Eden-like compared to ruins of the town. And Hicks leaves us with the possibility that perhaps someday the pig-people, by the fact of their very existence as sentient beings and by the example of how they live their lives (they are remarkably peaceful and compassionate), will be able to offer humanity a new way of thinking about what it is to be human. But their story is still new and being born, and it is too soon to tell how it will end.
Henry, having accomplished all he set out to do in his short life, with nothing left to hold him to life, looks into the void where all the dead must eventually fall. He knows it’s there, and he's afraid. “The world was thin and glassy, and behind it Henry could see an ocean of nothing waiting for him.” (289) But then his friend Bethany returns. She was another person Henry tried unsuccessfully to help when he and his then-ghost devised a plan to aid the girl to leave Swine Hill—the results of which having gone disastrously awry. But now she comes to his aid. The unforeseen consequences of Henry's manipulations caused Bethany to undergo a transformation whereby she now exists “outside” existence, outside of space and time. She is able to travel through dimensions beyond even death. Thus, Henry and Bethany also leave Swine Hill—he as a ghost, she as something else—and they journey together to distant reaches of the universe, to discover a better place to live.
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Hicks’ novel depicts the gritty reality of dying towns and cities in today’s America**. He highlights issues of poverty, joblessness, de-industrialization, living in a capitalist society, urban decay, as well as issues surrounding immigration and bigotry (with his introduction to the town of the "pig-people", of course). His prose grounds the reader in the lives and circumstances of his characters with meticulous and layered presentations of setting and mood. Swine Hill is haunted. Its people are haunted, weighed down by generations of ghosts. It is a dying town that cannot finally die. Until it does, those remaining there cannot—or will not—move on.
The author explores themes of generational love and responsibility (what we owe the past and what it, in turn, owes us), he explores issues of racism (Jane is African-American, whose gossipping, mind-reader of a ghost-friend tells her what many in Swine Hill think of her!), as well as themes of loneliness and isolation, classism, coming of age, friendship, sacrifice and creativity. It is a richly-textured offering crafted in a landscape that is both harsh and unyielding. Yet it is a novel that also offers hope, if not for a better tomorrow, then at least for a necessary one.
The people of Swine Hill are the poor and unemployed, the disenfranchised castoffs that some would call the “losers” in society. Some may recover their lives and humanity; others will remain haunted, soon to become ghosts themselves. Hicks’ novel grasps the splintered reality of their lives and holds it up for our inspection like a broken flower. We are left haunted, yet at the same time at peace.Cheers, Jake.
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| "His name is Cruelty! He gave me life but gives me pipe-cleaner limbs!" |
*In the Nineteenth Century, Toronto was referred to as “Hog Town” because of the large number of pork-rendering factories it had.)
**And in Canada as well. South-Western Ontario is an example where free-trade and globalization had a great impact on people’s lives over the years, with the shuttering of factories and businesses and outsourcing manufacturing and services abroad.
Micah Dean Hicks, Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, New York, N.Y., 2019.
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