Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones

Finally I got to go to Florida, to the science fiction convention I was looking forward to in March 2020, as that year both of my kids and my daughter’s girlfriend were going to attend and read papers. This year it was just me and my daughter, plus all the friends we’ve made at this conference over the years and a few new people we met in and around the hotel pool.

My daughter’s paper was on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, both the medieval tale and the recent movie. Mine was about science fiction communities formed in reaction to the threat of disease and death in recent novels by women. I discussed Octavia Butler’s 1984 Clay’s Ark, Joan Slonczewski’s 1986 A Door Into Ocean, 1998 The Children Star, 2000 Brain Plague, and 2011 The Highest Frontier, Elizabeth Moon’s 1996 Remnant Population, Meg Elison’s 2014 The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, and Sarah Pinsker’s 2019 A Song for a New Day. My thesis is that in some of these novels, what is at first perceived as disease turns out to be a new form of life. In others, the main character must break away from fear of disease and death in order to be able to form a community that can protect or nurture others. When we read novels like these, some of our fear of disease and death is transformed by our realization that fear can keep us from perceiving different kinds of life and valuing the importance of caretakers and artists in our own communities. (When we fear for our lives, we often narrow our view of what is essential, but who has been more essential during the past two years than caretakers and artists?)

There’s a book room at the conference, and I can never resist bringing home a few new books. I’d actually gotten out some books that I’d pushed back on my bookshelf during the past two years, small paperbacks I’d purchased with the travel I had planned in mind. It was good to be traveling again, allowing myself to read a few from that pile of books! I read the next in Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files series, and the first in Elizabeth Moon’s series about a starship captain named Kylara Vatta. I was very restrained in my buying at the book room, buying a book for Ron, one to pre-read for someone else’s enjoyment, and one for me to read on the way home, Micah Dean Hicks’ Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones. It sounded necromancy-adjacent, so I decided to check it out.

Haunting the bones doesn’t turn out to have much to do with necromancy in this book, however. The original owner of the bones stays in the body along with the ghost—people and houses are haunted, in the strange town of Swine Hill, where the narrator Jane has always lived with her parents and younger brother.

The supernatural element of this book neither stands on its own as part of the plot nor stands up to the application of metaphorical weight. A pork processing packing plant has been the main employer in Swine Hill for decades, and when Jane’s brother Henry invents a “self-slaughtering” pig, it’s not played for laughs (like the talking cow in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe) or treated entirely seriously. The pigs were made to be exploited, and although there might be a faint suggestion that the people also were, that suggestion is never fully developed. Similarly, the suggestion that the ghosts are merely aspects of human guilt and regret can’t be fully developed, as they are the reasons that machines don’t work, houses are abandoned, and the local team wins every sports match.

Jane works at a grocery store, and we’re told that she
“had reasons for staying in Swine Hill. One was money. Saving enough to move to a new city and find a place to live, to be stable while she hunted for a job, was almost impossible when she needed new tires or when tooth pain drove her to the dentist or when something broke in the house and her mother needed help paying for it.
Another reason she stayed was that she was afraid she would lose her ghost. The ghosts were tied to what reminded them of their lives. If she left Swine Hill, her ghost might not be able to follow. Most people didn’t like their ghosts and were glad to have them gone, but not Jane. She’d had hers for so long, she couldn’t imagine who she would be without it.”

After inventing the self-slaughtering pigs, Henry wonders
“what would happen to all the people working here? Their lives, already so hard, were about to get worse. They would be angry, and they would find someone to blame….And the pig people, owned body and blood by the company they worked for, just corporate property, high-tech slaves. What would their lives be like—the pork plant their shelter, trade, and temple? What would it mean for the pigs themselves, fully aware that the factory owned them, able to see themselves in the faces of the animals they killed?”

Henry goes to high school, although it’s not clear why; he seems to be going through the motions, like the rest of the people in town. He habitually answers his math questions and leaves the others blank: “he had no time for the English and philosophy questions, paragraphs asking him to reflect on power and responsibility. Why was it that people without power were always blamed for what was wrong? Thinking about it only made him feel helpless and tired.”

When Henry has to be taken to the local emergency room, we get a description of the other people there and are told that “they didn’t think about their pain, instead fixating on the cost. They resented doctors the same way they did mechanics, experts who discovered a problem and then made them pay for it.”

Jane falls in love with a boy who has an especially vengeful ghost, the ghost of a younger brother he accidentally shot and killed. Although she frees him from his ghost, she can’t free him entirely from his family’s blame, and he eventually ends up as a ghost, too. His struggle could be a metaphor for something like drug addiction, but the inhabitants of Swine Hill are continually pulled between that kind of possible metaphorical resonance and the fantastic premise of the literally ghost-ridden town.

Jane finally escapes from the town. Her car, formerly “dead with ghosts,” is repaired; she finds it “running in the driveway. There was something hideous under the hood, her ghost told her. Dead hands moved the pistons, their breath igniting the stale air in its fuel lines, making the car rattle and thrum and roar on nothing but the insistence of the spirits that moved it. Jane wondered if the car would slip loose from her control and carry her somewhere she didn’t want to go. But as long as it got her far away from Swine Hill, she wasn’t sure it mattered where it took her.”

Readers may feel much the same. It’s an interesting premise, and the novelist does some clever things with it, turning it this way and that, but there’s no moment when everything is illuminated. The story stays dark, like the motives of the characters.