That’s the foundation for the story, a gritty reality circulating beneath a slightly more romantic, wistful tale of a girl and a boy and a ghost. Others find their hope elsewhere, in banding together, in each other. Some of the factory workers pray to his ghost because he offers a little hope in their dangerous, uncertain world.
it was to be counted as a wonder that there were not more men slaughtered than cattle.” The Ghost is an underage worker who perished in a terrible accident on the killing floor, one of the many who were chewed up and spat out by the factory and the society that allowed it to exist. The true origin of the Ghost in Of Metal and Wishes: “. To be completely honest, though, the parallels with Leroux’s tale only came to me as I was halfway through writing the book. And there’s the Ghost, who grants wishes and exacts revenge, who is so fearsome that no one dares go below to the labyrinthine sublevels of the meat factory. Here are the Phantom similarities: There’s a bit of an ingénue in Wen, who comes to live with her father on a factory compound after her genteel mother dies. and saw recent footage of poultry factory workers, mostly undocumented, no legal protections, laboring in the worst possible conditions, it awoke those memories of reading The Jungle and my understanding of that reality. So when, one evening a few years back, possibly bored, possibly morbidly curious, I watched the documentary Food, Inc. My experience with The Jungle was over half a lifetime ago for me, and yet I’m still haunted by it. “They were beaten they had lost the game, they were swept aside.” The characters in that book were caught in a Sisyphean nightmare, only when the boulder they were pushing inevitably rolled downhill, it would crush a foot, a hand, a heart. What I do remember was how I tore through the pages after that. I can’t remember whether I was rainy-day-bored or morbidly curious as I plucked it from among many equally dog-eared volumes. It wasn’t for school there was a faded-out old paperback copy on one of our many shelves at home.
When I was a teenager, maybe sixteen-years-old, I read Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. Of Metal and Wishes is easy to describe as a loose retelling of Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera, but I will tell you a secret: that’s not what I originally intended, and to me, that similarity is more of an overlay-the flesh as opposed to the beating heart of the story.
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