Scrapper

July 27, 2015
Bell’s (In the House upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods) succinctly titled and relentlessly grim second novel has the feel of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road set in present-day Motor City. Kelly is a psychologically scarred loner who feels himself to be two different men: “the scrapper,” a righteously violent being, and “the salvor,” someone who can fix the damage he finds everywhere around him. While scavenging for scrap metal in a blighted area of Detroit called the zone, he discovers a naked boy chained to a bed in the basement of an abandoned house. After freeing the boy, Kelly becomes obsessed with exacting vengeance on the shadowy perpetrator. Throughout, Bell has a tendency to overload the narrative with pain and gloom. Kelly “believe only in the grimness of the world, the great loneliness of the vacuum without end,” and his lover, an emergency dispatcher suffering from a degenerative condition, spends her days listening to “cries of human misery.” Periodic interludes about forced feeding in Guantanamo Bay, George Zimmerman, and Pripyat (an abandoned city next to Chernobyl) add unnecessary weight to an already weighty story. At its solid foundation, however, the novel is a morality tale about the duty to confront the evil in the world and within oneself, a tale told in powerful, controlled prose.

Starred review from September 1, 2015

Set in "the zone"--the abandoned urban neighborhoods of Detroit--this is a tale of hard emotions in a hard environment. At the center of the novel is Kelly, an emotionally distant man in has thirties who has shut down as a result of past traumas. He makes a living by scavenging scrap metal from abandoned buildings, which is something of a metaphor for his life. Things begin to change when he sparks a relationship with a woman as physically damaged as he is emotionally. Then, one day while scavenging, he discovers a kidnapped boy locked in the basement of an abandoned house. Following the rescue, for which he's proclaimed a hero, he starts to see himself as the protector of the boy and sets out to avenge his kidnapping. Along the way, he discovers that someone close to the child is hurting him and comes face to face with his own past and the conventional expectations of society as he strives to protect someone he loves. VERDICT Bell poses difficult, elemental questions about right and wrong and of what constitutes morality in a place where the usual rules don't always apply. And, refreshingly, the answers his protagonist arrives at are neither easy nor expected. [See Prepub Alert, 6/21/15.]--Lawrence Rungren, Andover, MA

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2015
Kelly moves among Detroit's countless abandoned homes, businesses, and factories scavenging copper wiring and pipe to sell for $3 per pound. It's hard and dangerous work, but it's the only work available. But things change for Kelly when he discovers a terrified young boy, shackled to a bed in an abandoned house. Briefly, Kelly is a hero. His meeting with the boy's parents is televised, and the owner of a demolition company offers Kelly a job. But Kelly feels sure the boy's abductor will retaliate against him. He prepares by training obsessively in one of Detroit's gritty boxing gyms. Bell's debut novel (In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, 2013) was decidedly otherworldly. Scrapper is rooted in the tragic reality of a once-great city's collapse, but Bell seems to be revisiting some of his debut's fundamental concerns: obligations to loved ones, redemption from past misdeeds. Unfortunately, Kelly, who is the only voice in the novel, refuses to speak of the failures that haunt him. Consequently, while Bell's portrait of a city brought to its knees is riveting, the human drama falls short.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)