A Tree or a Person or a Wall: Stories

Here we have Matt Bell at his most inventive and uncanny: parents and children, murderers and monsters, wild renditions of the past, and stunning visions of the present, all of which build to a virtuoso reimagining of our world.

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.

Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Soho Press
Published: 09/13/2016
ISBN: 9781616955236
Pages: 400
Weight: 0.80lbs
Size: 8.00h x 5.50w x 1.20d

Review Citations: Kirkus Reviews 07/01/2016
Publishers Weekly 07/11/2016
Library Journal 08/01/2016 pg. 89
Booklist 09/01/2016 pg. 48
Shelf Awareness 09/13/2016