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Title: A Tree or a Person or a Wall

Subtitle: Stories

Author: Matt Bell

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

Format: Unabridged

Length: 11 hrs and 11 mins

Language: English

Release date: 09-13-16

Publisher: Recorded Books

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories & Anthologies

Publisher's Summary:

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.

Members Reviews:

Modern Morality Fables

Matt Bellâs 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 Bellâs stories suggest weâve pretty much made a hash of it.

As a warning to fans of Stephen King or Edgar Allen Poe or even Shirley Jackson, you wonât find anything that straightforward within these pages. These are literary allegories chock full of evocative and disturbing imagery with plots that are often vague or surrealistic. Most seem to deal with the repercussions of human folly, like bigotry (âThe Migrationâ), over-reliance on technology and conformity (âFor You We Are Holdingâ) or the pursuit of eternal youth (âThe Inheritanceâ). The title piece, âA Tree or a Person or a Wall,â is about a young boy who spends his life imprisoned in a cell with an albino ape until such time as he will become the jailer and imprison another small boy, perhaps illustrating the vicious cycle of complacency that perpetuates evil.

The longest story âCataclysm Baby,â is a literal A-to-Z of freakish children born into an ever more desecrated world; each baby represents some aspect of the moral degradation of mankind and the ways in which weâve exploited [and will ultimately destroy] our world. This seems to be a popular theme with Bell as there are a number of straight-out dystopian and/or apocalyptic tales. In âThe Receiving Towerâ a small platoon of elderly men, seemingly the last on Earth, have spent countless years in some sort of military installation awaiting word from the outside world that their commission has finally been served and they will be allowed to leave. In âThe Collectors,â we get a glimpse into the final days of the real-life Collyer brothers, New York socialites turned hoarders who died as a result of being trapped amongst the debris and filth theyâd accumulated in their Fifth Avenue mansion. Sort of a microcosm of mankindâs relationship to the planet and, taken in the context of the rest of the collection, certainly some sort of cautionary tale.

Bell has a great command of mood and his language is very haunting. The stories have a way of sticking with you and making you think.