Synopses & Reviews
A 19th-century minister builds an elaborate motor that will bring about the Second Coming. A man with rough hands locks a boy in a room with an albino ape. An apocalyptic army falls under a veil of forgetfulness. The story of Red Riding Hood is run through a potentially endless series of iterations. A father invents an elaborate, consuming game for his hospitalized son. Indexes, maps, a checkered shirt buried beneath a blanket of snow: they are scattered through these pages as clues to mysteries that may never be solved, lingering evidence of the violence and unknowability of the world.
A Tree or a Person or a Wall brings together Bell’s previously published shorter fiction — the story collection How They Were Found and the acclaimed novella Cataclysm Baby — along with seven dark and disturbing new stories, to create a collection of singular power.
Review
"Bell joins a class of genre-blind writers that include Karen Russell, China Miéville and Emily St. John Mandel....Doom-inflected poetics aside, Bell tells deeply human stories that resonate in odd, sad ways." Shelf Awareness
Review
"Told in a mythic, omniscient voice, some of these pieces read like cruel fairy tales....Imagine a tale from Lydia Davis on a bad trip...smart and edgy." Library Journal
Review
"A clutch of stories with a flavor of the experimental, the apocalyptic, and often both ... Admirable efforts to strip familiarity and sentiment from stories of humanity at its worst." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"These fables plumb the depths of human longing... a collection that resonates like a tuning fork, lingering after the book is closed." Publishers Weekly
Review
"In extraordinary language, with deep feeling, Matt Bell has crafted a baby name book for the apocalypse, a gorgeous, brilliant, often darkly hilarious and always moving novella...I loved this book and want to recommend it to every human parent and child I know." Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia!
Review
"Mr. Bell has written a gripping, grisly tale of a husband’s descent into and ultimate emergence from some kind of personal hell." The New York Times
About the Author
Matt Bell is the author of the novel In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award, a Michigan Notable Book, and an Indies Choice Adult Debut Book of the Year Honor Recipient, as well as the winner of the Paula Anderson Book Award. His stories have appeared in Best American Mystery Stories, Conjunctions, Gulf Coast, The American Reader, and many other publications. Born in Michigan, he now teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.