A Tree or a Person or a Wall

July 11, 2016
Bell’s (Scrapper) collection packages 17 stories with one novella, “Cataclysm Baby.” These fables plumb the depths of human longing and depravity. In the titular story, which opens the collection, a man with rough hands—it’s implied he has done violence in his past—holds a boy prisoner with an albino ape in a small room, where the boy begins to transform. This dark coming-of-age tale sets the tone for the rest of the collection. Each story is infused with the sense that there is something unseen and dangerous in the distance. In “His Last Great Gift,” a spiritualist preacher visited by the ghosts of America’s Founding Fathers directs the creation of an intricate motor that will usher in a new utopia. “A Long Walk with Only Chalk to Mark the Way” is a retelling of Theseus’s battle with the Minotaur, taking place in a hospital with a dying child. The settings, and Bell’s sentences, reflect the shadowy emotional tenor of the collection: murky lakes, a mysterious satellite tower. The total effect is a collection that resonates like a tuning fork, lingering after the book is closed. Agent: Kirby Kim, Janklow & Nesbit Associates.

July 1, 2016
A clutch of stories with a flavor of the experimental, the apocalyptic, and often both.Bell's debut novel, In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods (2013), was an extended riff on origin myths with prose that foregrounded the loping lyricism of the title. Much of this collection is written in a similar mode, though the mood is usually darker. "Wolf Parts" is a visceral rewrite of "Little Red Riding Hood" that focuses on those big teeth the wolf has, "The Migration" is a collective dispatch about outrage and riots after the murder of a pregnant immigrant, and "The Collectors" revisits the grim tale of the Collyer brothers, hoarders found dead in their overstuffed New York home. That last story is just one example of how much Bell enjoys exploring the moments when rationality slackens into madness, and he's superb at it in "His Last Great Gift," about a preacher who persuades his congregation that he's invented a crackpot "New Motor" that will improve society. And "Dredge" is a pitch-perfect noir about a troubled man who keeps a drowned woman's body in his basement freezer. Bell has a try-anything attitude that makes him an important emerging writer, but not every experiment comes off. The gambit of "An Index of How Our Family Was Killed"--its paragraphs are arranged alphabetically--mutes the intended atmosphere of loss and destruction. Likewise, the novella Cataclysm Baby, built on 26 vignettes about lost children in a degrading world, is overly engineered and clogged with portentous phrasings ("none remaining to bear our future forth except those afloat beyond the last lands of the West..."). Admirable efforts to strip familiarity and sentiment from stories of humanity at its worst, albeit with hit-or-miss execution.

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August 1, 2016

This is a collection of powerful and disturbing stories, seven of which haven't been published before, from acclaimed writer Bell, whose novel Scrapper is a 2016 Michigan Notable Book. Told in a mythic, omniscient voice, some of these pieces read like cruel fairy tales--"Wolf Parts" is in fact a dark riff on Little Red Riding Hood. Often, the theme is about absence, whether of body parts, an explained motive for bizarre turns of events, or even a specific narrator, as in "For You We Are Holding," in which the protagonist blends with a multiplicity of city dwellers, almost like a unified organism. Several stories ride the boundary between fiction and semantics. "The Stations" is a close reading of a little boy's first lie; in "The Cartographer," words replace map symbols to become narrative. In the titular piece, a boy is a permanent captive in a room with an albino ape. Deprived of language, the boy struggles to retain the meaning of words. Imagine a tale from Lydia Davis on a bad trip. VERDICT These intellectually provoking works will please readers of literary fiction who like their stories smart and edgy.--Reba Leiding, emeritus, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2016
As in Scrapper (2015), Bell's new collection paints familiar worlds with dark and peculiar hues to form eerie, often poetic fables about grief, loss, and hope. Many of these grim stories evoke Poe and H. G. Wells, such as His Last Great Gift, which follows an obsessive minister who attempts to build an intricate machine that will become the Messiah. Kafka also comes to mind, particularly in the title story, in which a boy is confined to a bed in a locked room with an albino ape that both threatens and befriends him. Yet for all the creepiness, there's an equal amount of tenderness, such as when a girl speaks only to her doll to fill the void created when a mysterious man kidnapped her brother. In the vignettes that form the novella, Cataclysm Baby, assorted parents try to love their children born with deformities, hunt for fruit, and transform into butterflies, among other bizarre instances. The ominousness can feel oppressive at times, but Bell's confident style and nuanced genre-blending will both delight and disturb.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)