A Tree or a Person or a Wall, Matt Bell
A Tree or a Person or a Wall, Matt Bell
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A Tree or a Person or a Wall
Stories

Author: Matt Bell

Narrator: Andrew Garman, Andrea Gallo, Karen Chilton, T. Ryder Smith

Unabridged: 11 hr 11 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Recorded Books

Published: 09/13/2016


Synopsis

A Tree or a Person or a Wall gives us Matt Bell at his most inventive and uncanny: parents and children, murderers and monsters, wild renditions of the past, and acute takes on 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.

About Matt Bell

Matt Bell is the author most recently of the novels Scrapper (a Michigan Notable Book) and In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods (a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award and an Indies Choice Adult Debut Book of the Year Honor Recipient, as well as the winner of the Paula Anderson Book Award). His stories have appeared in Best American Mystery Stories, Tin House, Conjunctions, Fairy Tale Review, Gulf Coast, and many other publications. A native of Michigan, he now teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Roger on August 11, 2016

Inventive but Often Gross Well, they warn you: "Dark and disturbing… a virtuoso reimagining of our world." Full credit for that imagination; I just found the darkness hard to take. I have read nine of these 18 stories—including the longest at 65 pages, so rather over half—and that is enough for me.......more

Goodreads review by Hayley on May 03, 2018

Wonderfully weird short stories......more

Goodreads review by Blake on August 29, 2016

Matt Bell’s A Tree or a Person or a Wall might be categorized as Existentialist Horror. If human beings are the architects of our own fate, then Bell’s stories suggest we’ve pretty much made a hash of it. As a warning to fans of Stephen King or Edgar Allen Poe or even Shirley Jackson, you won’t find......more

Goodreads review by Michelle on September 17, 2017

It's always difficult to review a short story collection because I tend to read them over time and between novels- but this was an exceptional collection. These stories are not pretty, yet Matt Bell captures the horror, desperation, isolation, and absurd tales with a straightforward writing style th......more