A Stasis Of Secrets: Matt Bell's "In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods"

Even before the publication of his debut novel, it was hard to imagine what else writer Matt Bell was capable of doing. His short stories are diverse, often complex studies of religion, history, and interactions, freely moving themselves in and out of a variety of genres. 2012's Cataclysm Baby took this even further. It's a small novella packed with creepy, post-apocalyptic and/or historical stories by twenty-six fathers beset by mutated, demonic offspring. The recent release of In The House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods was preceded by a stunning array of praise, so much that anyone unfamiliar with Bell's work would likely lump it into the "over-hyped" category. Booksellers and writers took to social media after reading their advanced copies and called it the best novel of 2013. Publisher's Weekly featured the novel on a previous cover issue. And Soho Press, the publisher, took out a full-page ad in Harper's. As I wrote in my review of Cataclysm Baby, I almost wish that Bell would write a poor story or piece of fiction; as much as I support and admire him, I wouldn't be afraid to constructively criticize a piece of his that I found lacking. However, I recently finished In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods, and my assessment is pretty much the same as everyone else: this is really one of the best books of 2013, and on top of that, it's one of the most original pieces of fiction in recent memory.

I say this as someone who doesn't read much fantasy/fabulist/magical realist fiction, but In The House Upon.... is a stunning, contemporary fable, and works along the same lines as shorter, classical fables: it tells so much with such basic information, and allows Bell the room to create a staggering array of possibilities. The story centers on a recently married couple: the wife is unable to birth a son (or any child), and the husband, a fisherman/hunter, grows increasingly angry and grave. The wife has magical powers through the strength of her songs, the ability to create and conjure anything except the child. There are miscarriages, false hopes, and disappointments. The husband begins to spend an increasing amount of time outside.

"My wife frowned but did not deny me, for in those days we refused each other nothing. She created and created, and when I could not abide any more of her objects--shapes meant for a once-expected childhood, now only mocking, robbed of any right utility--then I began to take more of my hours outside the house I had built, inhabiting instead the lake and the woods, whose strange failings could not be laid so squarely upon my deeds, nor the body of my wife (Bell 16-17)."

In the process, the husband becomes the host of a fingerling--a spirit/entity, representing a lost child, swimming throughout his body and speaking to him. In a sense, the fingerling represents his darker thoughts, his doubts, and the urges he seeks to repress:

"I circled round behind the house, and there I discovered the garden already unmade, its dank sod overturned, the many buried objects of baby raising now ripped anew from its earth so that they might be reinstalled in the house, each useful at last.

And then to have to look back at the house I had built, filled now with what I had not.

To have to listen to the fingerling say, I TOLD YOU SO, I TOLD YOU SO TOLD YOU SO.

To have to have him be right, and yet to not yet know what that meant (Bell 37)."

As time passes, the husband notices a large, menacing bear around the property, and the wife finally has a baby. However, the husband doesn't approve of the child and doesn't believe that it is truly his own offspring. He names the child "the foundling," and his interactions with him are either nonexistent or grim. This isn't just a case of absent or unwilling parenting--along with the voice of the fingerling, the husband finds himself in a complex, mystical game between his wife, the child, and increasingly, the bear. Bell's writing manages to go down two very different paths at once: it relies on what appears to be simplistic storytelling, the kind found in historical fables and fairy tales, but at the same time, like those tales, there is so much happening. The metaphors come slyly and forcefully. The father's narration is sometimes uncomfortable.

"For that foundling, our false son, my wife and I played at parenting together, and in those early years we learned him in the ways of our family, and also the first four of the elements, dirt and house and lake and woods: Cross-legged upon the fur-covered floor, we told him what we had been taught, that those four aspects were all we were--but then my wife said there was another, a fifth, and that this element was called mother, that it was her mothering that made the foundling, more so than any other. I thought this to be a lie but said nothing, kept silent my concern at her greedy deception--and then as I withdrew I came as well to discern elements previously unknown (Bell 41)."

The synopsis above and the cited passage could be viewed as spoilers by readers whom have read the novel. However, even while hinting at the looming outcomes, it says nothing while, in hindsight, saying much. These dynamics hold steady for several pages before stunning revelations and further plot developments arise, including a mysterious world both similar and different from the house upon the dirt to the father's communication with the bear and the ability to take other forms. Bell highlights these fantastical developments by playing with the novel's format. Some chapters are barely a page long, and others are broken up by stanzas and brief, staccato paragraphs. The mysteries and forms sometimes reminded me of a nineteenth-century novel written by experimental writer Blake Butler. I'm not alone in noting thematic similarities between Bell and other writers; Brooklyn-based writer Tobias Carroll said In The House... reminded him of Angela Carter and Cormac McCarthy. However, Bell isn't copying anyone else. It's unique writing that wonderfully evokes what has come before it.

"And in this room: The voice of the foundling as I had rarely heard it, as he talked to my wife when they were alone. A voice high and eloquent, curious and questioning, so different from the silence that blanked his wild face whenever I appeared.

And in this room: the number of times my wife hurt the foundling, even accidentally. A number so close to zero.

And in this room, the number of times the foundling touched me without fear, counted up and counted through, each enumeration instanced, made distinct. Here was the foundling, wiggling his tiny fingers in his crib.
Here him clutching my then-offered finger, here him putting that finger into his mouth, biting hard (Bell 118)."

There is really no tidy way to summarize this book, or to place it in any true time period. There are elements of history, but also no real references beside the house, the woods, or the lake, save for the mysterious place resembling them. At times, I found myself imagining the family as an isolated frontier settlement, but there are references to a watch and photographs. The novel doesn't need a definitive place or setting--again, like other fairy tales, the emphasis is on the immediate happenings, morals, and identities. Also, there are so many themes to consider that it sometimes becomes delightfully overwhelming--to name a few, Bell writes about family, marriage, parenting, masculinity, humanity's relationship to nature, and the consequences of assuming new forms and identities. The reader will also find him or herself amazed at some of the sentences. As Bell as consistently proved, his writing and imagery are beautiful and rife with layers. In this novel, there are so many unique paragraphs and sentences worth underlining and quoting. The passages I've shared in this review are for context, and I haven't even come close to highlighting my favorites:

"The days were thieves, and the happier ones the worst, their distractions allowing the hours to pass unnoticed, allowing the minutes to be snatched away without knowledge of their passing (Bell 57)."

And this passage below has been shared countless times via social media, with emphasis on its killer final line:

"That was the question I worried at, that I gnawed at like a bone, a cast-off rib too stubborn to share its marrow. And when at last that bone broke, what truth escaped its fracture, was by it remade: for even our bones had memories, and our memories bones (Bell 26)."

I very nearly didn't write this review, since so many other outlets and readers have shared much more eloquent assessments of the text. Also, having followed Bell on Twitter and Facebook, he's allowed people to share glimpses of the creative journey, from outlines to excerpts to last week's publication. But In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods truly is one of the best reading experiences I've had, and writers like Bell are showing glorious new avenues for the novel, a constantly eulogized format. If anything, I hope that someone stumbles upon this review and decides to pick up a copy. I've spent years writing about old and new literature, and this is one of the best works for someone to buy or check out on a whim and be vastly entertained by great fiction. As I mentioned in regard to Cataclysm Baby, there are so many books and writers worthy of being discovered and enjoyed by newer, bigger audiences. In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods is not only no exception, but a shining example of this.

Work Cited:
Bell, Matt. In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods. Copyright 2013 by Matt Bell.

Beautiful Monstrosities: Matt Bell's "Cataclysm Baby"

I rarely read outside reviews or synopses of the books I review, but a certain phrase led me to look over Will Kaufman's essay on Matt Bell's Cataclysm Baby. Writing for Quarterly West, Kaufman offered a piece of mild criticism in the hopes of countering his “slack-jawed endorsement-gasm.” My own mentions and analysis of Bell's writing would seemingly fall into that category. Bell's diversity and craft were on full display in How They Were Found (2010, Keyhole Press), a story collection that touched upon almost every genre, in experimental and classic styles, and I was enamored with his writing to the point of my own endorsement-gasm, recommending the work to as many people as possible. For years, Bell has published his stories in a variety of journals, amassing a varied bibliography, and now he's moving into longer published works. Cataclysm Baby, a recent offering from Mud Luscious Press's Novella series, has been receiving praise in the same fashion as his short fiction: word-of-mouth recommendations, independent reviews, and most importantly, the strength of its content.

Cataclysm Baby is divided into twenty-six chapters united by a common theme: fathers dealing with evil, mutated, and animal-like children. The time period is left intentionally vague, and there are recurring hints of plagues, biblical doom, and post-apocalyptic calamities. The chapter headings (“Ulmer, Ulric, Ursa,” “Nessa, Neve, Nevina,” etc.) form a strange, alphabetical baby name list, and I spent the first few chapters attempting to connect the names with the events, but after awhile, I realized this was unnecessary: the real focus is on the isolated fathers and their reactions to the sad, twisted offspring. The trials of parenthood have been fictionally documented in many ways, but rare is the book that features a father dealing with problems like “...our dark-eyed beauties so impossible to keep in their wicker cribs, to keep inside our rude-made gravedigger's hut, perched at the rent edge of this barren plot. See them squirm free of their cribs, their new and segmented bodies falling to the packed-dirt floor and out of this home I built for them and their mother.”


Even in the most fantastical, mythological settings, Bell manages to keep the scenarios grounded and perversely plausible. Other writers would make the mistake of attempting to top each passing chapter to the point of making this type of work a distracting collage of transgressive fiction. While different in scope and tone, the events of Cataclysm Baby work in the same vein as the stories in How They Were Found: even when dealing with the extremes, Bell's writing is focused on descriptive excellence and not a need to make the children and atmospheres outlandish. The reader becomes caught up in the suspense and gloom, but also in the bigger picture: all of the chapters hint, either explicitly or metaphorically, to much larger themes. For example, a section describing a wolf-like pack family offers this aside that not only ties into the story, but could stand alone as its own exploration of communication and togetherness:

“When the meeting is over—when the moon enters the waning that awaits it on the other side of our words—only then do we give up one language for another, to come together as one people, one troubled nation of tribes. As one mouth we combine our voices, a cacophony rising as if to crack the earth, as if to shake the heavens, as if to loose the turning moon from her mount and bring it crashing down upon us, the only mass heavy enough to bury our giant grief.”

Are the twenty-six fathers and their various children supposed to be connected, or do they inhabit singular biographies? A case can be made for either, since Cataclysm Baby is composed in such a way as to lend itself to a myriad of definitions and structural possibilities. This could be one world, or it could be a mural of isolated scenes. Stretching this even further, Bell even adds sketches of dark comedy and straight-forwardness, therefore adding strains of normalcy to situations that are anything but normal. In some of these chapters and worlds, what appears to us as freakish are just ordinary happenings in the lives of the characters. What never wanes, however, is an overall atmosphere of desperate hope. Even with fragile sanity or utter perplexity with the physiques and actions of their children, the fathers strive to hold their lives together, even if this sometimes means taking drastic measures. With that, there's a sociological, universal thread that ties the reader to situations that seem to be straight out of a pure horror story.

Matt Bell continues to be an invigorating artist, exploring different forms and storytelling angles. None of his works have ever relied on gimmicks or stories without at least a handful of potential meanings, and Cataclysm Baby is no different. I've read the work twice in the last month, and even going into it that second time, I found multiple passages that seemed fresh or exposed new territories for the course of the book, offering even more ways to analyze such a slim volume. To counter my own “endoresment-gasm:” should Bell ever produce a work that stumbles in its execution, it will be easy to criticize, since his first two publications have shown what he is steadily capable of doing. However, that's a purely hypothetical scenario, and Cataclysm Baby is the latest offering from a writer who really needs more attention than he already receives.

NOTE: Recently, the publishers of Mud Luscious Press have encountered financial difficulties to the point of their next four publications being in jeopardy. Writers, readers, and other presses have started a big push to shed led on the publisher's excellent works in the hopes of helping them raise enough capital to be able to continue their book publishing. Visit the site to learn more about their available materials.

The Stories of Matt Bell: The Lost and the Found

My association with writer Matt Bell is based on a few interactions via social media, as well as a brief meeting and hello at this year's AWP festival. Last year, Jeremy selected His Last Great Gift (published in Conjunctions) as one of the first featured stories for Instafiction. I had never heard of Bell before this, and I was stunned by the depth of the story, a tale of a religious sect leader and the creation of a mysterious electronic messiah. After we linked to this piece, Bell immediately reached out to share his enthusiasm for our project, and I took to discovering more of his work. While Twitter interactions do not constitute a representation of someone's personality, I was doubly fascinated with his work (he's an editor for Dzanc Books as well as the literary magazine The Collagist) and his devotion to promoting literary excellence. He has published dozens of stories in a variety of journals, and has made quite a name for himself in the world of small presses and independent literature. As I mentioned before, I had the chance to meet him at AWP 2012, and I picked up a copy of How They Were Found, his debut story collection. Why am I putting so much emphasis on these small personal details? I'm doing so because his stories, while amazing on their own, take on even more significance when Bell's work to make great stories more widely read and appreciated is understood.

How They Were Found contains stories that glide between various genres while adhering to standard narratives and deliberately deconstructed forms, and sometimes manage to combine all of these ideas at the same time. For example, the book opens with "The Cartographer's Girl," a story that focuses on normally standard themes (relationships, loss, and death), but told from a decidedly non-standard point of view. The cartographer's relationship is highlighted with map legends that indicate where various landmarks of his relationship happened, and his attempt to pinpoint where the relationship has gone becomes a journey that needs to be mapped and documented. That might sound impersonal, but by using his own skills to come to terms with what happened, the cartographer's story is touching and heartbreaking.

"The cartographer compulsively maps everywhere he visits, draws on any surface he can find. At the bar down the street from his house, he draws topological renditions of the layout of the tables, of the path from his stool to the bathroom, of the distribution of waitresses or couples or smoke. There are many kinds of maps, but none of these get him any closer to where he needs to be. He keeps drawing anyway, keeps drinking too, until he feels his head begin to nod. He pays his tab, gets up to leave. If he walks home fast enough, he might be able to fall asleep without dreaming of her.

It is never enough to assume that the reader of the map will approach it with the same mindset the cartographer does. Even omitting something as simple as a north arrow can render a map useless, can cast doubts on all it's trying to communicate. Other markings are just as necessary. There must be a measurement of scale, and there must be a key so that annotations and markings can be deciphered, made useful (Bell 16-17)."

In "Wolf Parts," the idea of the "deliberately deconstructed" takes on new, graphic meanings. The tale of Little Red Riding Hood is not only told from various points of view, but is constantly stripped and manipulated. This is done so that by the end, the standard fairy tale is not just re-imagined, but infused with new levels of violence, philosophical meanings, and psychological implications. Passages of intense violence are written alongside passages of hilarity, so the reader also has to take in a mixture of new emotions as well as the new documentation of the classic fairy tale.

"An axe is a knife is a pair of sewing scissors: Tools as weapons, weapons as tools. Ways to cut yourself out from inside a wolf, or, in other circumstances, to cut your way back in.

Red and her grandmother had seen this trick before, and so could not be taken by surprise. Red refused to leave the path, the grandmother declined to open the door, and when they each questioned the wolf through the bolted wood, they already knew the cheap answers he would offer. The only one surprised was the wolf, who knew not where these women had gotten their knives, nor where they had learned the sharp skill with which they wielded them (Bell 151)."

Bell is also skilled at creating his own modern fables. There is a wonderful metaphor in "The Leftover," in which a couple breaks up and the woman finds herself living with a small version of her ex, a version that engages in the very actions she made him quit. Hundreds of stories have been written about breakups and their aftermaths, and this version shows how a simple idea can change the obvious into something unique. It's sweet and detailed, and after awhile the strange scenario feels normal as the woman mentally explores the changes in her life and the qualities of her ex.

"During this same time period, she comes to understand that it's not only the bad habits Jeff quit that make up Little Jeff. There are also qualities that Allison forgot she even missed, because they've been gone so long or because they disappeared from her and Jeff's relationship without announcing their departure. She notices the long absence of these traits only when they reemerge: Little Jeff writes poems on the backs of take out receipts and on yellow sticky notes, just like Jeff used to do. She finds them in odd places, as if Little Jeff doesn't understand that it might be more romantic to put them on her side of the bed or on her nightstand (Bell 172-173)."

The above citations are examples of Bell's gift of careful humor in odd places, but his work is also capable of serious, gripping accounts. One of my favorites in the collection is "Dredge," a mystery about a troubled man's attempt to find out who killed a young woman. His desire to do good is complicated by horrible memories from his childhood, and the fact that he embarks on his mission entirely alone, even going so far as to keep the woman's body in his freezer. For every step he takes in the right direction, circumstances and his own clouded personality force him to take steps back. There's no doubt that he's sincere, but his mental state makes him dangerous to himself and others. The story leads to a definite climax, but along the way, the reader is torn between sympathy and nervousness for what could conceivably happen.

"In the garage, he tries to lift the girl's tank top to get to the skin hidden underneath, but the fabric is frozen to her flesh. He can't tell if the sound of his efforts is the ripping of ice or of skin. He tries touching her through her clothes, but she's too far gone, distant with cold. He shuts the freezer door and leaves her again in the dark, but not before he explains what he's doing for her. Not before he promises to find the person who hurt her, to hurt this person himself (Bell 122)."

Another exploration of genre comes in "The Receiving Tower," a nightmarish story told in a small, claustrophobic setting. A group of soldiers are losing their memories while stationed at a desolate outpost under the command of an abusive, murderous captain. The original war is vague and possibly not even a threat anymore, but the icy surroundings and lack of communication makes situation even worse than any potential battle. There are elements of sci-fi and future dystopia, but the emotions and tensions come from the everyday activities of the lost soldiers.

"As I remember it--which is not well--young Kerr was the first to grow dim. We'd find him high in the tower's listening room, cursing at the computers, locking up console after console by failing to enter his password correctly. At night, he wandered the barracks, holding a framed portrait of his son and daughter, asking us if we knew their names, if we remembered how old they were. This is when one of us would remove the photograph from its frame so that he could read the fading scrawl on the back, the inked lines he eventually wore off by tracing them over and over with his fingers, after which there was no proof to quiet his queries (Bell 27)."

These are just general synopses of a few of How They Were Found's stories, but I feel they give an excellent representation of the work as a whole. The genre-bending and originality are beautiful, but having followed Bell for this last year, I feel this work represents something more. Bell is one of many writers who create amazing literary art that is often overlooked by mainstream readers of fiction. These particular stories have links to various genres, and prove that independent publishers and journals aren't in the market solely for exclusive purposes. How They Were Found was a stunning experience, but there's more to this than a simple review: The collection was published by an imprint of Dzanc Books, which offers this as part of their mission statement:

"Dzanc Books not only publishes amazing books, but works to champion literature and writing in the schools, and is fully committed to developing educational programs. Dzanc funds and runs workshops and Writer-in-Residence programs in several cities, including Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti and New York. Dzanc has also set up a low-cost writing instruction program for beginning and emerging writers by connecting them with accomplished authors through the innovative Dzanc Creative Writing Sessions. Dzanc also sponsors the Dzanc Prize for community service, and works in partnership with literary journals to advance their readership at every level."

Simply put, I'm hoping that this review, along with the curative work of Instafiction, not only shows that literary writing can appeal to the mainstream, but that there are often a lot of overlooked benefits to supporting small presses. Works and writers like Bell are deserving of more attention, representing a world of literature that has its dedicated readers, but could appeal to so many more audiences.

Work Cited:
Bell, Matt. How They Were Found. Copyright 2010 by Matt Bell.