A Tree or a Person or a Wall
Stories
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- $2.99
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- $2.99
Publisher Description
“Blurs the often fine lines between literary and genre fictions, allegory and horror, magical realism and bizarro . . . An unforgettable reading experience” (The New York Journal of Books).
A nineteenth-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.
Named one of the best books of the year by the Chicago Review of Books, A Tree or a Person or a Wall brings together Matt Bell’s acclaimed short 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 work of singular power.
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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.
