Micah Dean Hicks is the author of the story collection Electricity and Other Dreams—a book of dark fairy tales and bizarre fables that won the 2012 New American Fiction Prize. He is also the winner of the 2014 Calvino Prize, the 2016 Arts and Letters Prize, and the 2015 Wabash Prize.
His stories and essays have appeared in dozens of magazines ranging from the New York Times to Lightspeed to the Kenyon Review. Hicks teaches creative writing at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. His latest book is Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones (John Joseph Adams/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).
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.