A Tree or a Person or a Wall

by Matt Bell

In "A Tree or a Person or a Wall," a young boy is held prisoner by "the man with rough hands,",who traps the boy in a locked room with an albino ape, his only companion and a seeming conspirator in his captivity. As the boy attempts to befriend this animal, begging for its help, he also loses his tenuous grasp on reality, until all that remains is a terrible sound, began upon the ape's lips and now screeching through the boy's skull, and also some unclear object seen through a distant dirty window, a tree or a person or a wall that might or might not hold the clue to his escape.

Matt Bell is the author of HOW THEY WERE FOUND, published in October 2010, as well as three chapbooks, Wolf Parts, The Collectors, and How the Broken Lead the Blind. His fiction has appeared in Conjunctions, Hayden's Ferry Review, Willow Springs, Unsaid, and American Short Fiction, and has been selected for inclusion in anthologies such as Best American Mystery Stories 2010 and Best American Fantasy 2. His book reviews and critical essays have appeared in The Los Angeles Times, American Book Review, and The Quarterly Conversation. He is also the editor of The Collagist and of Dzanc's Best of the Web anthology series. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with his wife Jessica,

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Horror, Magical Realism, Fantasy, Horror Thriller, Anthologies

16 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 13, 2016

About the author

Matt Bell’s next novel, Appleseed, was published by Custom House in July 2021. His craft book Refuse to Be Done, a guide to novel writing, rewriting, & revision, will follow in early 2022 from Soho Press. He is also the author of the novels Scrapper and In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, as well as the short story collection A Tree or a Person or a Wall, a non-fiction book about the classic video game Baldur's Gate II, and several other titles. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Esquire, Orion, Tin House, Conjunctions, Fairy Tale Review, American Short Fiction, and many other publications. A native of Michigan, he teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.

Reviews

[Roger Brunyate · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

Or maybe Red returned not with a line of small girls but with the wolf himself in tow, a rope turned cruel around his neck and her knife wet with his protests. In this version, it wasn't until she reached the village center that she slit the wolf from throat to tail. Too late, she retrieved each and every child from the wolf's stomach, each one bruised and bloodied and without breath. In anger, the villagers filled the wolf's belly with stones while Red held close his howling head, recounting for him the many names of these dead children, the many pounds of shale and limestone it would take to buy their penance.

This is from "Wolf Parts," a nightmare compilation of every version of the Little Red Ridinghood tale, with twice that number of his own, all endlessly recurring, in which Red gets eaten by the wolf, gets raped by the wolf, enters the wolf, enters her grandmother. It is full of themes that come up again in the other stories: murder and violence, the subduction and death of children, a wallowing in female sexuality including menstruation and childbirth, the blurring of the line between animal and human, and a dystopian world where nothing is as it should be.

The longest story, for example, "Cataclysm Baby," is structured around a list of baby names from Absalom through Zedekiah as this couple (one of the very few still able to do so) keep turning out babies into a polluted world, each coming out more deformed than the last. The title story, which opens the collection, is a bleak Kafkalike fable about a boy imprisoned in a room with an albino ape by a man with rough hands; his only way out is when he shall become the keeper in his turn and imprison another boy. In "Dredge," a story with a more normal setting, a man with a dark childhood pulls a drowned teenage girl out of a pond but, instead of notifying the police takes her home to keep in his freezer.

But there are also stories whose originality resides as much in the way they are told than in the horrors they contain. "A Certain Number of Bedrooms" uses house catalogues as a way of alluding to an off-camera family tragedy. "The Collectors" does much the same with a numbered paragraphs to build an inventory of an increasingly macabre situation. And in my favorite, "An Index of How Our Family Was Killed," Bell does just that, providing a 14-page alphabetical index to a crime story we never get to read:

Absence of loved ones, never diminishing no matter how much time has passed.
…
Bruises so black I couldn't recognize her face, couldn't be sure when I told the coroner that yes, this is my mother.
Bullets, general, fear thereof.
Bullets, specific: one lodged in my father's sternum, another passing through skin and tissue and lung, puncturing his last hot gap of air.
…
Zero: what will remain.

[review copy from Amazon Vine]

[Hannah · Rating 4 out of 5]

These stories followed me into my dreams.

I found this an inconsistent collection (and too long!) but the stories that worked for me really worked for me. At his best, Matt Bell's stories gave me the feeling I have when reading Emily St. John Mandel - so obviously I am now going to read everything he has ever written (even before reading this I was already mostly convinced that he'll be an author for me). I adored so much of this and felt these stories so viscerally. What an experience.

[Darwin8u · Rating 4 out of 5]

God I loved some of these stories so much. The more I read of Bell, the more I'm blown away by his voice and creativity. I'll add more later, but ye Gods. I'm going to be haunted by some of these stories for a long time.

[Brian Wraight]

Stopped reading after 125 pages due to getting annoyed with Bell's highly allegorical style. Every sentence is a riddle shrouded in vagueness wrapped in symbolism soaked in wannabe intellectualism dipped in sophomoric philosophizing.

[Phee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really interesting and somewhat bizarre stories. As with all collections of stories, some were better than others but some were absolutely fantastic. The author has a very interesting writing style which won't be for everyone. The stories beg to be read aloud which I did for the most part. I'm curious to see what this authors novels are like now I've had a taste of their writing.

[Hayley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderfully weird short stories

[Blake Fraina · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 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 (“The Migration”), over-reliance on technology and conformity (“For You We Are Holding”) or the pursuit of eternal youth (“The Inheritance”). The title piece, “A Tree or a Person or a Wall,” 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 “Cataclysm Baby,” 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 we’ve 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 “The Receiving Tower” 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 “The Collectors,” 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 they’d accumulated in their Fifth Avenue mansion. Sort of a microcosm of mankind’s 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. This is a brilliant collection. I can recommend it not only to high-minded horror fans, but anyone who’s interested in well-written, modern morality fables.

[Julie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I picked up this book because I read an article extolling its creepiness and thought it would be a good Halloween read (despite not typically being a fan of short story collections). Well, I ended up not finishing several stories because they were too vague or confusing and just didn’t hold my attention. Others I skimmed or skipped entirely. The few that elicited any positive reaction from me were Dredge, The Collectors, and A Long Walk With Only Chalk to Mark the Way. I made notations on other stories: “Pointless, meandering, depressing, ambiguous, unfulfilling, anticlimactic.” And those descriptors basically sum up the book overall. (The star ranking I gave to the book is the average ranking I gave to the individual stories.)

I received a complimentary copy of this book from the Amazon Vine program.

[Kelly Lynn Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Creepy, spooky, unsettling, but delightful. Reminds me somewhat of Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber, but even darker.

[Luci · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first few stories in this collection had me thoroughly intrigued by their strangeness and symbolism. As I moved farther into the book, however, I found myself more confused by some of the stories than intrigued or entertained. Of course, this can happen with a collection of stories, and nobody is expected to like them all, but after I got a bit more than halfway through, I found myself simply wanting to get through some of the stories, hoping the next would be much better. There were a couple that I finished feeling that they truly had no purpose or meaning. I did like the last story enough, but I wasn't wowed by it like I was by some of the earlier stories. I liked that it made sense and had a decently satisfying ending though.
The themes of forgetting, family dynamics (in particular children's use to the family unit) and searching/being lost were all very prevalent throughout the collection.
Overall, a decent selection of stories, but not one I'd like to read again or even keep on my bookshelf.

[Michelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 that somehow makes them beautiful

[Allie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really, really like Matt Bell's fiction, but this isn't a collection I'd recommend to someone I was trying to get into his work. This lengthy collection, which has some overlap with his 2010 collection How They Were Found, is organized into seven parts, dividing the stories (and one novella) loosely by theme. Bell's work, like much of my favorite fiction, blurs the lines between experimental fiction, horror, folklore, and science fiction.

Unfortunately the first section, which contains the rough string of "Doll Parts", "Dredge", and "Wolf Parts", is particularly bleak and, frankly, gross. I have a weak stomach for body horror and gore, and, since becoming a parent last year, I also have a significantly reduced tolerance for even fictional depictions of children in pain or distress. I'm not surprised to see other reviews saying the reader gave up after the first few stories.

If you keep digging (or simply skip around), the rest of the collection starting with section II is fantastic. There's horror, yes, but more melancholy than bloody. Bell also masterfully plays with both language and structure, storytelling through catalogues, maps, inventories, and lists. Favorites of mine include "The Collectors", "His Last Great Gift", "The Migration", and "A Long Walk, With Only Chalk to Mark the Way", which moved me to ugly tears on the couch.

[Franco Romero · Rating 5 out of 5]

Matt Bell's style is unique. There is no other contemporary author who weaves sentences like his, or who by extension is able to navigate the sentences themselves into stepping stones that guide the reader to a point, or sometimes to an idea or other times still beyond an idea. His style is not one that will be appreciated by any reader. This is not a book that, for instance, one would give as a birthday present to a friend that reads casually. What it is however is a deeply rewarding reading experience for any reader who is prepared to thoroughly examine it.

The title of the collection encompasses what is at the heart of Bell's style and indeed what is at the core of these stories. A tree, a person, a wall: objects, people, the universe? What are each of these subjects? When you break down their functions in terms of language as Bell does over and over again, taking note of the way titles define who and what we are or the subtle differences we use to distance ourselves from each other, they become extensions of language, not the other way around. Bell's deep mastery of the English language, of the subtle traits and roles we define ourselves through, is what gives these stories their lyrical power. Each paragraph deserves at least two readings for full effect.

Several early reviews of this collection have used the word 'allegorical' to describe Bell's work. Maybe there's some truth to that, maybe not. He's certainly trying to say something with these pieces- attempting to discuss such topics as redemptive violence, the misguided modern-male mindset, mortality. But whether this work really deserves the label of allegory is certainly debatable. It is more accurate, perhaps, to say that Bell turns convention and expectation on its head by disrupting that which makes us feel comfortable, and through this strategy is able to point out our failings as human beings. A good example of this is the way in which the parts of these stories that we feel safe in regards to often turn on us. These stories are often horrific but there is still that western storytelling comfort that shows itself. Except, in a Matt Bell story, it is likely to become sinister like the haunting albino ape in the titular and first story in the collection who becomes a more sinister force as the story progresses, or the little girl in 'Doll Parts' who we come to discover is not as innocent as she appears. There is nowhere safe to turn, and perhaps Bell would like us to realize that we have no one to blame for that but ourselves; after all, are we not the ones who seek out such horrors in our fiction?

A Tree or A Person or A Wall is a haunting read; perfect, in fact for October, though arguably always a good fix for a craving of short, literary fiction that breaks genre tropes and defies compartmentalization. Bell has already flexed his fiction muscles with the superb novels 'In The House Upon The Dirt Between The Lake and The Woods' and 'Scrapper.' Having his short fiction collected now in one volume demonstrates that he is a writer whose style is both adaptable and formidable.

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

The best stories here are genuinely incredible, like, 5-star stuff, but they're nestled within a collection that's by and large nowhere near as strong. I'm fascinated by the way Bell writes, and by the forms of story structure that seem to interest him - which are almost without fail just not the kind that most interest me at the moment. I could see revisiting this in the future and having an entirely different and much more positive opinion of it, and I look forward to checking out his other work.

For anyone interested, I thought: "Dredge," "His Last Great Gift," and "A Long Walk with Only Chalk to Mark the Way" were genuinely incredible short stories, and "The Receiving Tower" very nearly their equal (kind of like "The Thing" as a much more mundane sort of apocalypse). Many of the rest succumb - again, in my opinion this time around - to allegory that's so abstract it gets flattened out into nothing. I also think this collection's broad characterization as being "horror" or "genre" is somewhat ill-advised, although I also can't blame people for not knowing what to do with it. And there are plenty of horrific elements throughout, but this is just something else entirely.

[Sarah Pitman · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don’t know. This should have been a four or five star. I was so ready for it at first. I love weird. I love magic realism, eeriness, unexplained disturbance. But somehow...this book didn’t do it for me. Line by line writing was great, lyrical. But the characters were almost all...the same. In the authors attempts to make this fairytale-like, to lean into the beauty of the strange, I feel he lost concrete characterization in many of these stories. Everyone was part of a gorgeous, elaborate tale, many of them felt more like metaphors than people. The stories were too short in that they don’t establish their world, but too long in that very little happens from one to another that is surprising or different from the one before. Would u read more by this author? Sure, but would rather go with a novel where he’s forced to actually develop characters and plot. Most of these felt like incredibly detailed premises, then not much else.

[Quinn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really liked the first story (the title story) because of how mysterious and strange it was. I was really excited to finish this book, but once I got to the the sister and the doll (apologies, I don't remember the titles), I was just... confused. I forced myself through that one. The one about murder and necrophilia sorta just disgusted me, and, again, I was hella confused. The Red Riding Hood was about really wanting to have sex with the wolf? Some kind of trauma? It's been a while since I read this and I've forgotten a lot, so apologies. I'm also not a very smart person, so I'm sure there are plently of themes I missed. But I do remember how I felt during reading this, and if was not a good feeling. I skipped around the book to Cataclysm Baby, which was fine. Honestly, it was pretty fun, no complaints here. In the end, I do like Bell's writing style, but everything else about his stories are very, very weird. Unfortunately, not for me.

[Adam Rodenberger · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have loved Matt Bell's writing since I first read "How They Were Found," a collection from which many of the stories in this collection originated. He is dark and constantly keeps my brain buzzing long after a story or book is finished. I appreciate his imagination as mine often goes off into strange places as well (not because it's considered "cool" to write that way, as some suggest; it's just how some of us are built).

He makes me want to be a better writer myself, to plumb the depths of my own stories further to see where they'll take me and my readers.

If you came expecting nice, easy, pretty prose that always leads to answers, you're gonna be seriously disappointed. If you came to lift rocks in the dark to find out what existential terrors lay beneath, then you're in good hands.

[Samantha · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is probably a good way to introduce yourself to Matt Bell's short fiction, as it compiles a bunch of his older work (Cataclysm Baby is a favorite of mine and what made me a fan of Bell's) with some newer stories. You get a good idea of his go-to themes (children, parenthood, disappearance), which are complemented by a style that's somehow both simple and artful. This isn't straight-up horror, as some seemed to expect, but if gross, horrifying allegory makes your brain tingle, I'd give this a shot, even if only in small doses.

[Chris Scott · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's clear from this collection of stories that Matt Bell is a creative thinker, but I find his allegorical and elusive-bordering-on-generic storytelling and writing style to be a major barrier to enjoying his fiction. There are a few interesting ideas here buried under layers of MFA-speak and sentences that appear to have been creative-writing-class-workshopped within an inch of its life, including not one but TWO stories that rely on 'alphabetical order' as a framing device. Reading this was a frustrating experience.

[Caelan Alexander · Rating 2 out of 5]

Spectacularly spine chilling. Matt made me feel quite uneasy and tense, wielding an odd use of literary devices as a weapon of the tongue. However, is this a good book I would recommend? No. Whilst the first couple of short stories were somewhat enjoyable, by the third story, I was seeing a pattern forming: dead and tortured kids at an attempt to disturb. The formula worked - to make the reader feel vile and uneasy - but where is the substance? I would recommend reading these without order and story by story. As short stories: quite interesting. As a book: lacking.

[Vincent · Rating 4 out of 5]

Favourite stories: Inheritance, Wolf parts, The cartographer, Cataclysm baby, His last great gift.

I liked these the most for their fantasy aspects (especially wolf parts, MAINLY the fantasy aspect and not the disturbing bit).

I'd say I love the last story, too, if I didn't get sad and existential at the end.

Overall, it was a great read, and the wording is unique to a new reader like me. It took me a couple of tries to fully grasp what's being conveyed (at least I hope I do), but as a whole, I'd recommend this to someome wanting something a little more uncouth.

0.o

[Gerry LaFemina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Matt Bell is good at what he does--these post modern stories, often without characters, use a lot of poetic technique, which satisfies the poet in me...sometimes. The fact is the book feels dense, the prose gimmicky in that way that suggests the author is getting more out of it than the reader will get. One doesn't get insight into the lives of characters but into mindset of an author, anguage itself, and the boundaries of narrative.

[Iza Kocsis · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is realy interesting. Every short story has its own meaning and for me it took a lot of time to realise some.

(spoiler)One of my favourites is Her Ennead, because its realistic and makes me wonder about all women who didn't wanted child and what they feel.


I think the best way to read it to make some side notes so you can rethink them when you read the book again. You shouldn't read two (or more) story after each other

[Barry · Rating 4 out of 5]

If the title of this short story collection raises an eyebrow, that’s because its thought provoking content is on full display. As with his previous works, including the novels In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods (2014) and Scrapper (2015), as well as his previous collection How They Were Found (2013), Matt Bell blurs the often fine lines between literary and genre fictions, allegory and horror, magical realism and bizarro in these 18 tales.

(A side note to Bell fans: there is a bit of a misleading description to this book. Although A Tree . . . does contain a number of tales from How They Were Found, as well as including a number of uncollected and newer works, it omits several others, making it a worthwhile addition to one’s library, rather than a replacement.)

Fans of Angela Carter, Paul Auster, Kelly Link, Brian Evenson, Haruki Murakami, and Cormac McCarthy may find a particular affinity for Bell’s works. His writing style is at once innovative and emotional, weaving stories that are both fascinating and devastating to read. His prose is lucid and often omnipresent; rarely, if ever, does he use quotes to signal dialogue.

Characters are often referred to not by name, but by definition (“the man with rough hands,” “the men who killed),” creating a simultaneously immersive and removed experience for the reader as the characters take on an almost mythical role.

A Tree’s stories are split up into a total of seven groups, each of which are loosely connected by subtle themes. Part I, for instance, features stories that fall largely under Bell’s twisted take on horror. Part II’s stories are largely existential and metaphysical in nature, and Part IV’s are deeply heartbreaking morality tales.

The other parts are a bit more exclusive. Parts III and V each contain two longer works, including the dystopian “The Migration” and the period-set “His Last Great Gift,” whereas VI and VII consist entirely of novellas, including the previously-printed (and out-of-print) tale, “Cataclysm Baby.”

There are some truly disorienting and unsettling tales in this collection. In the opening title story, a boy has been kidnapped and left locked up in an isolated room, where he finds a desperate companionship with its other occupant: an albino gorilla. In “Wolf Parts,” Bell presents no less than a whopping forty variations on the tale of Red Riding Hood, many of which are quite gruesome and discomforting. And there’s “Dredge.”

“Dredge” tells the story of a man named Punter, who discovers a dead teenage girl’s body floating in a pond. However, instead of reporting this, he takes her body back to his house . . . where he stores it in his game freezer. However disturbing this premise may sound (and make no mistake about it, it is quite disturbing), the tale takes a number of unexpected turns, revealing the pathetic details of Punter’s background and motivations, building up to a climax that’s every utterly heartbreaking as it is grotesque.

Another example of Bell’s knack for emotional distress is the subtly alarming “Doll Parts.” In this story, a mother creates a life-sized doll for her daughter—a doll that perfectly resembles the girl’s missing brother. As the narrative progresses, the reader is slowly subjected to hints as to what happened to the brother, all while the girl’s own behavior with the doll begins to peel back the layers of her relationship with her brother.

“Although the sister no longer spoke loud enough for the mother or father to hear, she did often whisper to the doll, putting her soft lips to his rubber ear, making the smallest sound she could. She told the doll a great many secrets, almost always having to do with the brother. The very first secret she told the doll was how she—and only she—knew where the brother was. How she knew was because she had gone looking for him, after the brother disappeared, but before the mother made the doll.”

In other tales, Bell’s storytelling innovations are on a more overt display. For instance, “The Cartographer” is a point-by-point series of descriptions of different parts of a map of a man’s doomed romance.

“Her Ennead” is a series of metaphorical (and at times, metaphysical) interpretations that an expecting mother is interpreting of the life growing inside her womb, told in differing phases of her pregnancy.

And “The Collectors,” an unflinchingly empathetic glimpse into the minds of the infamous hoarding brothers Homer and Langley Collier, is told as a series of inventory entries.

Bell’s much-lauded tale “Index of How Our Family Was Killed” is exactly that: an A–Z presentation of various facets in the deaths of a family. Similarly, the aforementioned “Cataclysm Baby,” 26 men relate, in alphabetical order of baby names, their attempts to repopulate a post-apocalyptic world . . . although every child that’s born is struck down by tragic and at times horrifying birth defects.

These tales will not be for everyone’s tastes. They may be too existential and literary for some horror fans, and much too dark and macabre for the more casual fan of literary fiction. Spanning a variety of styles and subjects, Bell’s tales are all told in a distinctly confident and haunting voice, rendering an unforgettable reading experience every time.

[Marvin]

Stories that tend toward the magically real, fairy tales and the weird. Kind of ran together for me and always seemed to be reminding me how clever they are. That's probably just a me thing, though; I'm not the right audience for this book. Skipped and skimmed after a while and just had to lay it down. Highlight: "Dredge."

[Shannon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Matt Bell has this way of telling stories that are both fantastic legend and unadorned reality. Beautiful, heartbreaking, unbearable, and necessary. Impossibly dark and yet full of light. I adore his work.

[Kat · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well-written, if incredibly bleak. Dark and moody; a couple stories in particular are downright haunting.
One standout for me was "Wolf Parts" - a poetic Red Riding Hood. Reminiscent of Angela Carter.

[Jim Ivy · Rating 5 out of 5]

If it were an option, I would whole heartedly give this book 10 stars. One of the best collection of short(er) stories I’ve ever read. So strange to have it come to a close and feel a loss within me, to have to move on. What next. Read this book and you will understand.

[Heather Nilson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some of the stories were compelling and gruesome, some were just gruesome, and some were convoluted and confusing.

[Ashley Rodriguez · Rating 4 out of 5]

This took a few stories to really get into, and of course some were better than others. Once I got used to Bell's writing style I enjoyed his creepy narratives.