In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods

Fantastical and nightmarish, Matt Bell's novel unravels the many births, deaths, and transformations that estrange a couple living in "the house built upon the dirt," isolated in an expansive nowhere. Matching the repetition of words and phrases, narrator Charlie Thurston uses rhythm and its momentum as his guide. This is the husband's version of events, and Thurston's performance reveals his descent into mania as he is caught in a tug of war between mythical sons. Thurston's tone is often confrontational, even loud, emphasizing the husband's changing states of frustration and helplessness. Yet the writing and performance combined cause the grotesque events to seem quite natural, creating an unsettling but compelling story. A.S. (c) AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine

March 11, 2013
This debut novel from up-and-coming Bell (Cataclysm Baby) is a dark, intriguingly odd fable about what it means to be a father. The narrator (no character is given a proper name) takes his new bride to a secluded house in an area populated only by wildlife, including an overly symbolic she-bear. The carefully wrought prose takes its cues from magical realism: “Beneath the unscrolling story of new sun and stars and then-lonely moon, began to sing some new possessions” to furnish their rustic abode. Things get stranger still when the man consumes his still-born son’s body. The couple struggles to conceive again, until one day the woman brings home a young child dubbed “the foundling.” The man can’t accept the boy and, haunted by his dead child’s ghost, descends into madness. The sketchy narrative and characters, however, interest Bell less than large-scale themes: the oedipal competition between a father and son for a mother’s love; threatened masculinity; and, more elliptically, man’s impact on the environment. This challenging, boldly experimental attempt at myth-building may resonate with equally ambitious readers, but offers fewer rewards to those looking for narrative pleasures. Agent: Kirby Kim, William Morris Endeavor.