![]() ![]() 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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