Ghost Horse (McNeely)

Ghost Horse
Thomas H. McNeely, 2014
Gival Press
262 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781928589914


Summary
Set amidst the social tensions of 1970's Houston, Ghost Horse tells the story of eleven-year-old Buddy Turner's shifting alliances within his fragmented family and with two other boys—one Anglo, one Latino—in their quest to make a Super-8 animated movie.

As his father's many secrets begin to unravel, Buddy discovers the real movie: the intersection between life as he sees it and the truth of his own past. In a vivid story of love, friendship, and betrayal, Ghost Horse explores a boy's swiftly changing awareness of himself and the world through the lens of imagination. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Houston, Texas, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Texas, Austin; M.F.A., Emerson College
• Currently—Boston, Massachusetts


Thomas McNeely grew up in Houston, Texas, where he made Super-8 movies as a child. After graduating from The University of Texas at Austin, where he spent too much time reviewing movies for The Daily Texan, he worked for several years as an investigator for The Texas Resource Center, a non-profit law firm that defended death row prisoners. This experience became the basis for his first published story, "Sheep," in The Atlantic Monthly.

After receiving an MFA from Emerson College, he was a Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer in fiction at Stanford University. His short stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Ploughshares,  Virginia Quarterly Review, and Epoch, and have been anthologized in The Best American Mystery Stories; What If?: Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers; and Algonquin Books' Best of the South: From the Second Decade of New Stories from the South.

He has also received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Dobie Paisano Program at the University of Texas at Austin, and the MacDowell Colony. He currently teaches in the Stanford Online Writers' Studio and the Emerson College Honors Program. Ghost Horse, his first novel, winner of the Gival Press Novel Award, was published in October 2014. (From the author.)

Visit the author's website.

Book Reviews
A Texas boy grapples with his parents’ estrangement in McNeely’s debut novel.... McNeely beautifully portrays the confusion of a boy doing his best to deal with matters that are beyond his understanding but fully capable of doing him harm.... A dark, deeply stirring novel about the quiet tragedy of growing up in a broken family.
Kirkus Reviews


[A] haunting debut novel, which never allows its pop culture references or beautifully rendered sentences to soften the violence that life—his parents’ disintegrating marriage, his classmates’ cruelty, his grandmother’s vindictiveness—visits upon its sensitive protagonist.
Jeff Salamon - Texas Monthly


[A] wonderful under-the-radar book....The writing is sensitive, beautiful, and ominous...as if Cormac McCarthy and Denis Johnson teamed up to write a 1970s Texas YA novel that went off the rails somewhere—in a very, very good way.
Lisa Peet - Library Journal


McNeely explores the heartbreak and confusion of adolescence through the eyes of an 11 year old boy .... It's a shattering portrait, not only of the ways that divorce can unhinge a boy's life, but also in the ways that wayward adults can corrupt childhood innocence.
Charles Ealey - Austin-American Statesman


Ghost Horse by Thomas McNeely is a powerful debut novel; it is both a deeply moving coming-of-age story and an intense psychological portrait of a family in crisis. McNeely weaves an intricate web of a plot against the backdrop of the racial and class tensions of Houston of the 1970s, and explores themes of love, lost innocence, loyalty, and broken families. The tale of eleven-year-old Buddy over one unsettling year of his adolescence makes for a compelling and worthwhile read.
Leila Rice - Reader's Oasis


[A] story that will stay with you. A story of racism, and class tension. A story of broken families and lost innocence. McNeely takes you back in time to when you were eleven. As you read, you see everything as Buddy sees it, and understand it (or don’t understand it) as Buddy does. You see the edges of dark, adult truths through the unknowing, innocent eyes of a child. Over time, however, Buddy starts to pick things up. Not everything, but enough to know when something’s wrong.... A dark, beautiful, heartbreaking story, I found myself wanting to both quote everything and turn away in unease. McNeely weaves a tale you won’t soon forget.
Elizabeth O'Brien - Fueled by Fiction


Houston native Thomas H. McNeely explores the heartbreak and confusion of adolescence through the eyes of an 11-year-old boy..... It’s a shattering portrait, not only in the ways that divorce can unhinge a boy’s life, but also in the ways that wayward adults can corrupt childhood innocence.
Charles Ealey - Austin-American Statesman


McNeely writes with eerie precision the feelings of a child .... If you believe that a book should push you off balance and take you somewhere new, then Ghost Horse will deliver.
Ada Fetters - Commonline Journal

Discussion Questions
1. How do the movies that Buddy, Alex, and Simon imagine reflect their views of the adult world?  What elements from their lives do you see reflected in their respective imagined "movies"?

2. Buddy views his father as both hero and villain.  How does his view of his father change over the course of the novel?  How does your view of Jimmy change?

3. How did you understand Jimmy's motivations during the course of the novel?  Were you sympathetic toward him?  What do you see as the primary struggles that he faces in the course of the novel?

4. How did you understand Margot's motivations, both in distancing herself from Jimmy, and in being unable to break away from him?  How did you see her economic situation at play in her decisions?

5. Why does Buddy keep his father's secrets?  What is at stake for him, and what is at stake for the adults around him in keeping these secrets?  Does he understand this difference?

6. How did you see each of the boys' family lives reflected in their actions in the novel, e.g., in Alex's desire for order and Simon's obsession with other boys' secrets?

7. What roles do you see Buddy's grandmothers playing in shaping his world view?  What view of the world do you think that he will develop as an adolescent and an adult?

8. What role do you see that the city of Houston plays in forming the characters of the boys in the novel?

9. All of the boys in Ghost Horse suffer losses in their families—how does each of them deal differently with their losses?  Do you think that the book's message is one of despair or hope?

10. How do you think attitudes toward divorce have changed since the seventies? Do you think it is easier or harder for children of divorce now?

11. How do you see children today using media to connect, and sometimes harm each other? Do you think children see themselves and their relationships differently because of their exposure to media today?

12. How do you think attitudes toward race and class have changed in America since the seventies? Do you see a greater or lesser distance between races and classes now or then?
(Questions courtesy of the author.)

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