Review – Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones by Micah Dean Hicks (4.5/5 stars)

Reading Level: Adult
Genre: Paranormal
Length: 304 pages
Publisher: John Joseph Adams/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Release Date: February 5, 2019
ISBN-13: 978-1328566454
Stand Alone or Series: Stand Alone
Source: ARC from Amazon Vine
Rating: 4.5/5 stars

“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.”

I got a copy of this through the Amazon Vine program to review. This is a very odd and unique story that I enjoyed a ton. I could not predict what was going to happen because the situations these characters are in are just so incredibly bizarre. The book is well written and engaging.

This book includes numerous hauntings and ghosts, weird science fiction like inventions, and pigmen. All of this is set in a “plant” town on the brink of collapse. The characters we meet are haunted (both literally and figuratively) and strangely engaging.

This is the most unique book I have read this year and I was impressed with how engaging the story was and how quickly I read it. The ending is a bit more open-ended than I like in my stories, but it was appropriate for this story.

Overall this was a unique and well done supernatural story with a bevy of bizarre characters and situations. I would recommend to those who enjoy unique reads that features ghosts, hauntings, and just general craziness in a strangely engaging story.