In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods

by Matt Bell

In this epic, mythical debut novel, a newly-wed couple escapes the busy confusion of their homeland for a distant and almost-uninhabited lakeshore. They plan to live there simply, to fish the lake, to trap the nearby woods, and build a house upon the dirt between where they can raise a family. But as their every pregnancy fails, the child-obsessed husband begins to rage at this new world: the song-spun objects somehow created by his wife's beautiful singing voice, the giant and sentient bear that rules the beasts of the woods, the second moon weighing down the fabric of their starless sky, and the labyrinth of memory dug into the earth beneath their house.
 
This novel, from one of our most exciting young writers, is a powerful exploration of the limits of parenthood and marriage—and of what happens when a marriage’s success is measured solely by the children it produces, or else the sorrow that marks their absence.

Genres: Fiction, Fantasy, Magical Realism, Literary Fiction, Novels, Adult, Mythology

312 pages, Hardcover

First published June 18, 2013

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

[karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

this book is beautiful and maddening. it is convoluted fabulism, sad and irrealy real.

the setting and the atmosphere are like a fairytale, like The Snow Child, but the truths it dissects: romantic relationships, parenthood, and regret, are real and dark dark dark.

if you don't have time to devote to it,though, don't bother. it's not a long book, so it's not like it is a real commitment you will have to be making, but i read this while in the middle of a million projects at work, and the language was so lullingly meandering, that i would just zone out and find myself thinking about LMS and D-refs. which means nothing to you, probably.

so do the book more justice than i did, and quit your job, kennel your kids, give your spouse ten dollars to go to the fair, and focus. because there are moments in here that are staggering.

i gave it a four because it left an impact, for sure, but my experience of reading it, distracted and work-nerved as i was, was only a three.

but this is a book i will definitely revisit, and i know that on the second read, it will easily earn its four stars.

come to my blog!

[Kris · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book as an ARC from Netgalley.

In In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, Matt Bell has crafted a disturbing extended fable, in which he explores themes around marriage and parenthood, creation and destruction, and memory and aging. In haunting prose that echoes the cadences of oral tales and creation myths, he tells the story of a nameless couple who leave their families and friends after marrying and create a home for themselves in a quiet land, with a lake on one side of their house and woods on the other. The couple longs for children to make their family complete, but their efforts lead to a series of heartbreaking complications and misunderstandings, exacerbated by the husband's perplexity over his wife's seemingly magical powers of creation. I hesitate to tell more about the plot, such as it is, for fear of spoilers, but I can tell you that the novel features shape-shifting bears, foundlings and ghosts, acts of anger and revenge, and songs of creation and healing.

This is not a plot-driven novel. Bell's pacing is slow and meandering, and certain passages seem overly drawn out, which almost led me to give this book a three-star rating. However, his approach adds to the feeling of mystery and old magic in a book that is not at all a conventional work of fantasy or magical realism, but instead echoes the cadences of old tales from a long-lost oral tradition. My sense is that the novel could have benefited from some tighter editing. However, for readers who are willing to take their time with the novel and read it slowly, there's a wealth of themes to explore, and eerily-effective passages to read and savor. Much of the novel focuses on tensions surrounding fatherhood: Oedipal relationships, pain over losing closeness with a spouse, fear of death and loss of power to one's children. These themes are especially pronounced because much of the novel is told from the point of view of the husband. However, as we get deeper into the story, his wife's perspective also emerges. leading to depth in Bell's exploration of the complexity of marriage, and some sense of hope for generations to come.

[Richard Derus · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is nothing on Earth so potent as Myth. We're still discussing, with great cultural seriousness, myths made over 4000 years ago. So, since Myth is clearly important to us, where are modern myths? What brave soul sets out to tell us our stories in language of Myth?

What sad and sorry shape was born from her after those next days, that labor made long despite the lack of life within:

Not an arm, but an arm bud. Not a leg, but a leg bud, a proto-knee.

Not a heart but a heart bulge.

Not an eye but an eye spot, half-covered by a translucent lid, uselessly clear.

Not a baby, instead only this miscarriage, this finger’s length of intended and aborted future.

And what was not born: No proper umbilical cord, snaked from mother to baby, from placenta to belly, and so the starved child passed from my wife’s body into a clot of blood and bed sheet, and then into my waiting hand, where I lifted it before my eyes to look upon its wronged shape, that first terminus of my want.

Then to my lips, as if for a single kiss, hello and goodbye.

Then no kiss at all, but something else, some compulsion that even I knew was wrong but could not help, so strong was my sadness, so sudden my desire: into my body I partook what my wife’s had rejected, and while she buried her face in the red ruin of our blankets I swallowed it whole—its ghost and its flesh small enough to have in my fist like an extra finger, to fit into my mouth like an extra tongue, to slide further in without the use of teeth—and I imagined that perhaps I would succeed where she had failed, that my want for family could again give our child some home, some better body within which to grow.

Matt Bell. That's who. There is such beauty in the language he uses to clothe the horror of reality. There is no way to save yourself if you won't look at the ugly truth under the beautiful lie of Happy Happy Joy Joy...it is an illusion too frail to stand on, let alone to build on.

Matt Bell tells us this truth. He does so in lengthy sentences made up of complex conceptual memes (in the pre-Internet sense) of Nuclear Family, Happily Ever After, Fulfillment Through Biological Destiny. That can get, well, wearing. Three hundred pages of beautiful words shouldn't feel wearing...yet somehow that happens.

But they are gorgeous, aren't they? I mean...look at them. Cronus? Is that you?

[Scott Southard · Rating 2 out of 5]

I recently reviewed this book for WKAR's Current State.You can listen to my review here:

http://wkar.org/post/book-review-matt...

You can also read my book review below.

-

Sometimes the literary world can suffer from a case of The Emperor’s New Clothes.

We all know this story made famous by Hans Christian Andersen, of the ridiculous Emperor tricked into wearing nothing and the underlings around him too afraid to point out that he is only in his underwear. In the mind of the Emperor he is adorned in the greatest attire, but in reality there isn’t much left for the imagination.

In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods is a new novel by Matt Bell and a Michigan Notable Book for 2014. It also has wonderful reviews from the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and many other reputable book reviewers. And yet, I honestly can’t help but wonder if they all read the same book as me. Why aren’t they seeing the underwear too?

In The House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods is a book rich in symbolism and fantastical imagery. It is a world where a song can bring healing, animals talk, houses can be as endless as your memory, moons can be created and people can become squids. Overall, the imagery and the pace oddly reminded me a lot of the art films of Matthew Barney, like from his series The CREMASTER Cycle.

The story follows a married couple, their struggles to have a child, and then their mourning over the death of their only son, all in a world of natural magic. You can read the book in two ways, one in which the entire story is an emotional allegory; or you can read it as a new myth, stealing from Greek, Native American, and many other much better stories.

Sadly, Bell’s novel just isn’t very entertaining. One of the big reasons for this is that it’s hard to relate to the characters. They are really given no backstory and what we see as magical or bizarre never seems to affect them. While Neil Gaiman in his imaginative novels and stories can reach amazingly creative places, he still grounds it enough so he is taking us along. Matt Bell doesn’t do that. He expects you to swim or drown in his squid-filled waters by yourself.

Also, this is not a book for everyone, since it is a story where children will skin other children, a father will eat his deceased newborn, and a corpse that is buried never stays buried. Consider yourself warned.

Finally, this is a book with little to no dialogue, rooted more in long lyrical prose. Sometimes it can be quite beautiful, however, in other spots it can feel like something more belonging in a collection of poetry by a 13-year old. Maybe a story like this would have worked better as a short story or novella. Whatever the case, by the time I reached page 312, I was exhausted.

I don’t like giving bad book reviews. Yet, I can’t help but feel like the boy in Andersen’s tale who’s pointing and catcalling at the Emperor. It could be argued that the boy in that story was doing something brave. Me, I’m not brave, just a disappointed reader.

[Renee Godding · Rating 1 out of 5]

"And even if she could not remember his face, she could remember his voice. How tonedeaf he was. How he spoke ceaselessly, because like most men he could not sing. And because he could not say anything without too many words"
- A rather ironic quote from the book...


Magical Realism tends to be a polarizing genre in itself, but when reviews are this divided, it’s bound to catch my attention. As an overall fan of this genre and all its metaphorical strangeness, I had fairly high hopes. Unfortunately, the higher those hopes, the deeper the disappointment.

The House Upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods is almost impossible to accurately summarize, as it ultimately is more fairytale than traditional novel, and as such comes with quite some bizarre and gruesome imagery, as well as a great number of layers. On the surface, it’s a story about an unnamed newly-wed couple who leave their homeland behind to move to the uninhabited opposite shore of the lake. There they live off the land and build their new home from only the elements surrounding them. After a series of miscarriages the wife despair manifests in the ability to “sing” objects into existence; a second moon in the sky that signals the end of the world, a labyrinth of memorychambers underneath the house, and eventually… a foundling.
Beneath these mental visuals lies a tale of grief, despair, marriage, and the subconscious fears and desires that come with parenthood, that honestly has a lot of great things to say.
From this description alone, it isn’t hard to see that Matt Bell has an incredible talent for evocative imagery and metaphorical storytelling. There are some fantastic (if deeply twisted) ideas in here, and if you allow yourself to be carried away by these mental pictures, this reads like a surrealist piece of art that is equally mesmerizing as terrifying. Unfortunately, it was almost impossible for me to do so, due to one large thorn in the paw of this bear: the writing style.

I consider myself to have quite a high tolerance and even appreciation for highly lyrical writing. This however, was at the best of times pretentious and at the worst unreadable for me. Some passages seemed to be written with the sole intend of showcasing literary prowess, to the point where the sentences seemed to be created by replacing every word with their longest and/or most obscure synonym the thesaurus has to offer.
Other sections of the book use a lot of repetition as a stylistic choice. There’s a section where the protagonist explores the aforementioned labyrinth of memory chambers under the house. Throughout this entire track, every sentence starts with “And in this room”, followed by a description of what he finds, before continuing. And when I say “every sentence”, I mean every sentence… for dozens of pages on end… All I can tell you is: after one page it became annoying, after tree it became unbearable and after what seemed like forever I actually skipped the entire section.
There’s such a thing as stylistic choices, and then there is taking wordiness so far that those words themselves lose all their meaning and your message gets lost along the way. I can’t help but mark this as a novel that fell prey to this in many regards.

I reserve my one-star reviews for books that are unredeemably bad or harmful, or that I actively hated whilst reading them. I’m sorry to say that this book fell firmly in that second category.
If you’re still interested in giving this novel a try, I recommend you set your expectations properly, and approach it more like a piece of poetry than a novel. Take in the imagery, more than the literal words, and most importantly: read it in little chunks at a time. there’s undoubtably an audience of magical realism veterans for this novel, but I unfortunately wasn’t among them.

[Zoeytron · Rating 3 out of 5]

The reviews are all over the place on this one, not surprising for such an irregular weave. I loved the darkness of it, the weirdness of it, but the writing style wore on me, the repetitiveness irritating. But then I would come across a passage like this - '. . . around it her silence continued speaking for years and years, the sound of her saying nothing.' Or a mention of a bowl made of mirrors - as you drink from it, it drinks of you.

It is a tale of yearning, loss and regret. And blood, lots of blood. It's unsettling to finish a book and have such mixed feelings about it. Glad I read it, but was relieved when it was over.

[Chihoe Ho · Rating 1 out of 5]

Like it's title, this novel ran on and on and on and on and on... It started with so much promise, full of intrigue and despair, but the style in which it was written in got the better of it. This mythical story would probably have worked better as a novella.

Matt Bell is a talented writer, however, his words become very indulgent and tedious to read after the initial discovery. It felt like the same idea repeated, just churned out in various embellished ways - almost as though Bell wrote a couple of versions, couldn't decide on which one to use so sprinkled them all over the book. It came to a point where I had to decide between giving up on it, or skimming the remaining half. I chose the latter, and while there were glimpses of its former glory, I had by then mostly tuned out of "In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods."

[Richard Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

THIS REVIEW ORIGINALLY RAN AT THE NERVOUS BREAKDOWN.

In Matt Bell’s debut novel, In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods (Soho Press), we are lured into familiar territory—the world of fables and tall tales, where our expectations of the surreal, the grotesque, and the magical are fulfilled in ever-expanding layers. But beyond the illusions, beyond the world building, darkness, and the unknown is an allegory—a harsh yet beautiful lesson on what it means to be a man, a father, and a husband; to be a woman, a mother, and a wife. Told in layers, fractured into sections, unfolding in a grand tapestry that weaves emotions and actions into a complex series of destinies and consequences, this novel is not an easy read. But the reward is dense prose, powerful psychoanalysis, and the unsettling feeling that our own actions today—many miles from the woods with its failing bear, and its lake with its undulating squid—might be bound by similar rules and outcomes.

Our story begins in a land where a man and wife have left behind the busy city and the noise of commerce for the peace, beauty, and solitude of a distant body of water, a forest filled with life, and a simple plot of land upon which to build their humble home. But as the sentences unfold, the language teases anxiety out of every split log and trapped animal, every shadow and echo and bird call. Reality is not the same here—songs bring life to the quiet land and put moons in the sky—building, destroying, and transforming:

Things were odder here than they were elsewhere, and most stories were not written as clearly: On the other side of the lake, across the mountains, the truth had been inscribed in the stars, and could not be changed. Here, upon the dirt, my wife had wiped clean that sky-flung slate, and so I was not sure what to believe, or where to look to rediscover what once I had simply known.

To have one’s faith in reality, in God, in self, shaken like this is to let in an endless array of possibilities—both good, and bad. They come to this land to have a child, but are instead granted one miscarriage after another —the process, the death, the blood and anguish grinding them down into a paste of crushed expectations.

Where a lesser author may have shied away from the reality of these losses, here the gore and brutal truth remain on the page, lyrical in their violence, horrible in their honesty:

What sad and sorry shape was born from her after those next days, that labor made long despite the lack of life within:

Not an arm, but an arm bud. Not a leg, but a leg bud, a proto-knee.

Not a heart but a heart bulge.

Not an eye but an eye spot, half-covered by a translucent lid, uselessly clear.

Not a baby, instead only this miscarriage, this finger’s length of intended and aborted future.

And what was not born: No proper umbilical cord, snaked from mother to baby, from placenta to belly, and so the starved child passed from my wife’s body into a clot of blood and bed sheet, and then into my waiting hand, where I lifted it before my eyes to look upon its wronged shape, that first terminus of my want.

Then to my lips, as if for a single kiss, hello and goodbye.

Then no kiss at all, but something else, some compulsion that even I knew was wrong but could not help, so strong was my sadness, so sudden my desire: into my body I partook what my wife’s had rejected, and while she buried her face in the red ruin of our blankets I swallowed it whole—its ghost and its flesh small enough to have in my fist like an extra finger, to fit into my mouth like an extra tongue, to slide further in without the use of teeth—and I imagined that perhaps I would succeed where she had failed, that my want for family could again give our child some home, some better body within which to grow.

The shock of this scene, the horror, the love—it is unbearable. And yet, we bear it. This is a dark moment, a secret we will share with this man, the entire act, the bloodshed, the loss merely a parade of black—one layer of darkness after another.

The world around the characters changes, these failed births pushing them apart, the husband left to hunt and gather, the wife to sing her songs into the air, making and unmaking, losing herself in the process. They should stop. They must stop—this is not their fate. Every animal caught and buried, comes back to life, altered and bent, never whole again—“a mink without its fur, or else this beaver without the squared hatchet of its teeth, gnawing useless at a trunk it had no chance of opening.” Whatever he touches, it is tainted, a great sadness washing over their world, the light slipping away with every selfish act. Rooms appear, stairs descend, objects and creatures and moments are conjured, are trapped, existing in ways that they never should. It is not right. And the bear watches, the squid waits, and the house upon the dirt squats in exhaustion, waiting to expand.

Eventually the child inside the man will be known to us as the fingerling, and the wife will leave, she will disappear, and return with a son that is known as the foundling—secrets and lies their blankets and pillows, a sour taste left in bitter mouths. Even though nothing is right, they continue. The man acts as a man feels he should, doing what he can—hunting, fishing, building—anything to have a fixed goal, to act, instead of comprehending his actions, her actions, and the possible consequences. The foundling lives in the shadow of his mother, and the father is left out in the cold—unable to reveal his secret minnow, the fingerling that lives within him, unable to bond with his boy, the flesh that is not quite right. What frustration:

Soon the foundling bawled every dusk when I approached the house, even when I came empty-handed: for while it was his mother who cooked for him, he saw only that it was I who fished and trapped, skinned and slaughtered and butchered, and even though he had no trouble sharing in the meals we made it became my wife he thanked, and me he feared.

What to do? The sustenance met with pale, empty faces—the lack of gratitude setting fire to a slow boil that will eventually bubble over.

But scattered between these dark moments, are stories, rooms, and images of their love, is proof that what they have is good, is supposed to be alive, meant to survive the horrors and desperate acts. What he will later call the deep house, a plenitude of rooms filled with one captured moment after another:

And in this room: The times my wife touched me while I was asleep, happening here in sequence but cut away from their context, their chronology recognizable only by the changes in my body, in hers. How long she persisted. How I thought throughout that we were already estranged, that in out silences we were to come undone, unravel from our bonds. And yet in this room she ran her hands beneath the sheets, across the width of my widening back, traced her fingers through the salts of the day’s working, then wrapped her arm around the slumbering bulk of my belly, that round shape girthed heavier than that she had first married, that she then still loved.

You can feel a heavy sigh wash over the pages of the book, these moments that were missed, these quiet blessings that went unnoticed.

The novel expands in many different directions—the bear has her own story, and becomes an accomplice, as well as a continued enemy, her loyalties in a constant state of flux; the fingerling exists inside the husband, jealous of the foundling, making his needs known, giving, and then taking away, healing and hurting in equal measure; the wife leaves, and eventually, is found, all the while our protagonist striving to understand why, to ask the darkness why, to never grasp what brought this circle of hell to his doorstep.

It isn’t until the final pages, the acts continuing when it certainly must end, that our hero, our villain, finally understands that “no longer did I need to know all the seats of power,” that his surrender, his lack of self, would lead him to the place he had been striving to find all along—and all he had to do was let himself be saved.

You can certainly compare this dense, powerful, and heartbreaking novel to other fabulists, such as Kafka, Calvino, and Borges, but Matt Bell’s writing also owes a debt of gratitude to Cormac McCarthy, Kelly Link, Benjamin Percy, and Aimee Bender. In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods can only really be compared and assigned to one voice—Matt Bell’s—which is unique, innovative, captivating, and hypnotic in a way that only he can make it. This is a book that will be talked about, dissected, and shared for years to come because it is not only his story, it is our story—every single one of us.

[Robert · Rating 3 out of 5]

This novel reminded me of rowing a boat out to the middle of the lake, the water calm and clear and devoid of people and engines, the only sounds heard are the gentle rocking of the boat, the casting of the line as it whistles through the air, and the reel being unwound and wound. Instead of beer, there’s wine in the cooler, a sombrero on my head to block out the sun’s harsh rays, and a woman in a pantsuit to my left with her head back and sunglasses plastered on her face that make her look like a ladybug. The crisp air nips at my face, and the scent of pine fills my nostrils.

The language made me want to skip up and down the street whistling, and the poetic prose flowed like a sentence dissection expedition. I ended up feeling like this was a bit of a drawn-out affair, with even the title—IN THE HOUSE UPON THE DIRT BETWEEN THE LAKE AND THE WOODS—causing an individual to choke on multiple popcorn kernels. This novel reminded me of traversing a mountain pass on a Saturday afternoon on a day so clear you can see for miles, and clouds are nothing more than a distant memory. I loved the language and the mythology, but it felt a bit short on content.

If you like the kind of novel where you place it on a shelf and stare at it, where you focus more on the beauty and rhythm of the language than the words being said, and you happen to enjoy wandering around aimlessly for a few hours, then this book is for you.

I received this book for free through NetGalley.

[Blue Cypress Books · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyed the ride but have no idea what I just read. The novel is all about relationships, I think. There is the squid and the whale and the bear and the man and the wife and the child but it's all just so heavy with symbolic meaning that I need a therapist to explain it all to me.

[Watchingthewords · Rating 2 out of 5]

The latest installment from my Indiespensable subscription and I couldn’t wait to start!

A husband and wife move to the land between the lake and the woods to start their own life, across the lake from the city where they were raised. There they build their home and wish to build a family, but multiple failed pregnancies chips away at their hope, their marriage, and their sanity. That alone makes for an interesting concept for a book, but this one is wrapped in fable, a fairy tale, a fantasy world, and a nightmare.

I really wanted to love this book. I have thoroughly enjoyed each of my previous Indiespensable selections and had no reason to believe this experience would be any different. I know that this novel has received a great deal of critical acclaim. The writing style is certainly beautiful, lyrical, haunting. But, for me, the story is just too strange and unreal to truly enjoy. I understand fiction and fantasy involve the strange and unreal at times, but this just went too far for me, and when combined with the writing style, made the book seem overdone, too long, and frankly, painful. I don’t think I have ever given up on a book, but I was really tempted. I did finish, hoping that it would come around to something that touched me, but it just never got there.

See more on my blog at www.watchingthewords.com!

[Cynthia · Rating 2 out of 5]

Daddy Issues

“The House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods” is a lovely extended poem about marriage and its vicissitudes especially after children come along. It’s told in a mythical fashion from the husband’s point of view. A young couple is living in isolation very close to the land, hunting and fishing for their own food, living in a cave while they make their own house. The husband ardently wants children and the wife is having trouble carrying pregnancies to full term. They both become emotional strained and feel isolated in with their pain. Without others to mitigate their sorrows things start to go awry.

I’d liken Bell’s book to an overlong musical tone poem from the Romantic era, one with lush emotional themes intermixed with harsher themes but the whole thing seems to go on for too long and at the end of it you’re left both gorged yet unsatisfied wondering what it was all about. I wish Bell had kept his book to 100 pages or so. That would have left me in awe of his unique style, the beauty of his use of language, and still contemplating his points about marriage. At 300 pages I felt glutted.

This review is based on an advance reader’s copy supplied by the publisher.
(Disclaimer given per FTC requirement.)

[Amber Sparks · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful, dark, violent, heart-rending, and real. Fable and fairy tale, yes, and after the authentic traditions of the best of these - full of transfiguration, suffering, and deep and troubled love. One of the best books from last year, or any year.

[Ron Charles · Rating 3 out of 5]

Praise from writers you’ve enjoyed might lure you into Matt Bell’s strange first novel, “In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods.” Lauren Groff, who wrote “Arcadia,” one of The Washington Post’s top five novels for 2012, calls it “glorious.” Jess Walter, whose “Beautiful Ruins” is still on our bestseller list, suggests that Bell has “invented the pulse-pounding novel of ideas.” And here’s Karen Russell, fresh from “Swamplandia!,” comparing him to Italo Calvino.

Beware. A novel like this — not that there are many like it — presents a peculiar challenge. I don’t necessarily want to scare you away, but I’d hate to see you stumble into “The Lake and the Woods” expecting anything like Russell’s witty alligator farm. Think instead of the magical realism of her most bizarre story in “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves.” Then imagine that story chanted by a druid on mushrooms.

Bell’s opening line gives little indication that we’ve entered a very different kind of novel: “Before our first encounter with the bear I had already finished building the house, or nearly so.” So far, so Hemingway. But almost immediately, you can hear Bell’s prose shift into the fabulist register as this unnamed narrator describes his wife’s contribution to their home: “Beneath the unscrolling story of new sun and stars and then-lonely moon, she began to sing some new possessions into the interior of our house, and between the lake and the woods I heard her songs become something stronger than ever before.”

It’s an intoxicating opening, dreamy but intensely, sometimes grotesquely, physical and rendered in syntax that’s just twisted enough to push us off balance. Bell is working in a tradition that ­stretches from Aimee Bender to Richard Brautigan to Walt Whitman and much, much further back into the mists of myth. For readers weary of literary fiction that dutifully obeys the laws of nature, here’s a story that stirs the Brothers Grimm and Salvador Dali with its claws.

The edenic young couple at the center of “The Lake and the Woods” have moved away from civilization to “this far lonelier shore” where they can live off the land and raise a large family. But those plans are thwarted: “The dirt’s wettest season swelled, and then its hottest burst the world to bloom, and through those tumid months my wife swelled too, expanded in both belly and breast until the leaves fell — and afterward came no more growth, only some stalling of the flesh gathering within her. Even before it was obvious that there would be no baby, even then my wife began to cry, to sing sadder songs that dimmed our already-fuel-poor gas-lamps, or cracked cups and bowls behind cupboard doors.”

The rough poetry of those sentences is just as gorgeous as it is devastating, cream spiked with grief. Anyone — and we are far more numerous than we let on — who’s experienced the shock and grinding horror of miscarriage or birth defects will be especially hit by these early pages. “I began to take more of my hours outside the house I had built,” the narrator says, “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.” In wholly unpredictable language, Bell captures the way sorrow wedges itself between a hopeful father and mother, triggering recessive genes of blame and suspicion that successful pregnancies would have left dormant in their minds. The wife calls down the stars and knits mismatched booties for babies that will never be born; the narrator keeps his distance until, soon, they’re not speaking to each other at all — “our lives a stasis of secrets.”

Despite the poignancy of these passages with their startling mixture of pedestrian and magical details, the story’s dominant tone is more grotesque: At the scene of the first miscarriage, the narrator tells us that he is so overcome by sadness and desire that “into my body I partook what my wife’s had rejected, and while she buried her face in the red ruin of our blankets I swallowed it whole — its ghost and its flesh. . . . I imagined that perhaps I would succeed where she had failed, that my want for family could again give our child some home, some better body within which to grow.”

You can’t break away from these first few pages, swept by storms of celebration and misery, false hope and surging resentment. As husband and wife try and fail again and again to bring a baby to term, that first miscarried fetus, which the narrator calls “the fingerling,” becomes conscious in his father’s body. This toddler incubus then turns his father against his mother and drives him on a surreal and bloody ordeal that lasts for the rest of the novel.

The narrator’s dark night of the soul takes him searching through ever-expanding subterranean structures that would give Steven Millhauser nightmares. Images of fire and ash and a world laid waste recur throughout like a version of “The Road” retold by St. John of Patmos. That bear from the opening line comes roaring back — a mangy, furious creature desperate to reclaim its own lost offspring. And several chapters dive into the saltwater lake where a squid lurks, spawning a vast collection of children.

Bell is doing fascinating, unnerving things here in his exploration of the most painful aspects of family life. This is the Oedipal complex flipped on its head — the father’s shameful dread of the son taking his wife. As a vision of parenting — particularly, the bitterness of failed fatherhood and the latent fear of women’s creative power — it’s a provocative piece of work.

But like its title, “In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods” runs on longer than it should. (In an interview with Ploughshares, Bell confessed that there was a “version of the novel that was at least 200 pages longer than the final book and much less reader-friendly,” which is, frankly, terrifying.) One confrontation with a rotting, angry bear is enough. All these descents through burned-out rooms begin to blur together. That endless bickering with the ingested fetus — “the fingerling” — sags from disturbing to merely annoying. And despite the story’s dalliance with mythical and biblical arche­types, it passeth all understanding. I thought I had a pretty firm grasp on the meaning of “the other moon” and “the squid” and “the bear,” but when “the man” became “the squid,” I began to feel like a Bear of Very Little Brain. Bell has claimed these elements are not allegorical. “The bear is just a bear,” he says, but that’s either disingenuous or he’s hiking in very different woods from the ones I’ve been in.

His publisher, Soho Press, is very high on this book — it sent at least seven copies to my office. For more than 25 years, Soho has been publishing sophisticated work that other New York houses wouldn’t touch. In 2011, for instance, it released a fantastic novel by Alex Shakar called “Luminarium” that included passages that were sometimes just as demanding and surreal as those found in Bell’s novel, and I’m delighted that such books can find a publisher and readers who will appreciate them. But I worry that “The Lake and the Woods” is not just difficult; it’s overwritten. The author has substituted a series of symbolic poses for effective articulation, assuming that repetition will generate emotional power. The justly celebrated poetry of his prose uses such a small palette that we learn his brush strokes fairly early. Eventually, his ideas are buried in the house upon the dirt between the lake and the woods by the bear and the squid and the fingerling and the moon and the cave and the stars and . . .

Well, you get the idea.

[Margaret · Rating 4 out of 5]

Back when watching a monster movie on a Sunday afternoon after the homework was done was an achievable luxury (so YEARS ago), I came across Prophecy, a gem from 1979. Here is some classy monster movie poster art:



So a scientist hired by the EPA goes out to the Androscoggin River in Maine to figure out if a paper mill or something is going to poison everyone with mercury. An astute viewer might be able to conclude, why yes. Instead of the usual, mutant bears attack!



To top it off, the EPA scientist brings his wife along. She eats the fish with mercury in it, and she's trying to find the right time to tell her husband that she is pregnant. Those warnings about pregnant women not eating fish from some lakes because of the high mercury content? Well, they both remember now. So, mutant bears and potentially mutant babies!

Why am I going down memory lane about a bad monster movie when reviewing In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods? There are some striking parallels. The woods, the bears, the challenges with pregnancy. Except, In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods is better. I mean, I do miss a good terrible mutant bear suit, but the old movie was scary because bears jump out and attacks things while looking gross. In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods is scary because it quickly goes from being transgressive and disgusting to something deeper and more universal.

A husband, a wife, and a cabin in the woods. This will not go well. How spectacularly wrong, though, comes from the unnamed husband's reactions to his wife's frustrations with conception. She constantly miscarries for no explicable reason, and the husband can do nothing to help and stands by as she self harms as a coping mechanism. Pregnancy after pregnancy fails, the husband's thoughts are relatable and seem to be no different than the same emotions a husband would go through not in some scary isolated woods.

There are fairy tale elements as well, from the role of the fingerling and foundling to the creatures in the forest that surrounds them. There are definitely some violent, Brothers-Grimm-type elements to this novel, making a compelling mix of psychological realism and fantastical occurrences. Layer upon layer of plot are put together to build a compelling novel that fills over 300 pages in a captivating way.

I would never have picked this up on my own, but the quality of writing and manipulation of traditional genre tropes makes In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods more than worth it.

(Also, I have no idea how that movie ends because I had to go off and do something else, and these were the days before useful ways of recording TV programs. Good thing I can find out now on the Internet!)

[Kathy Cowie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am torn about this book. In the beginning, I didn’t think I was going to get through it. The language seemed too calculated; trying so hard for greatness when interesting would have been enough. Once I got into it, I found much of it beautifully written, even lyrical. But there were inconsistencies that I hope, given it was a proof, will be corrected. Sometimes, though I did think it was beautifully written, it went dangerously close to being pretentious. I became engrossed in this mythical world, but there were times I was confused. I can adjust to a completely created universe, but even a made up world needs to follow some rules and structure. We are told that the man and woman come from the city across the lake, but they seem completely naïve to come alone to a new world.

Since I read this on my kindle, I will tell you that I was caught up in the story, until just around 80% of the way through. If the story had ended there, I would have been happy. I would have said, “Well, that was interesting, gave me a lot to think about.” But instead, it just went on, and on, and on. I began to hate the word “foundling”, more than I hated the word “fingerling” before that. I have read the rave reviews for this book, but I am not convinced. I am looking at the listing in Goodreads, and I cannot believe this book was only 312 pages (there were no page numbers in my ebook). It seemed a lot longer than that, which, I have to say, says something right there.

[Valentina · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s hard to write a review for this kind of genre-bending book. It is such a detailed, nuanced novel, so wholly original, that it is tough to put into words what exactly makes it work. Because it does work.
I suppose it’s the writing. The lush, wandering narrative takes the reader on almost an underwater journey. Our senses are diffused by the fable-like story until we are just a little intoxicated by the descriptions. We never find out where it takes place, we don’t know the protagonists names, but it makes no difference. We are wholly immersed in this strange world the author creates.
The use of the animal symbolism throughout the entire novel gives it even more depth. The squid, the bear, they all become leitmotifs, giving us hints and guiding us along. Some parts read like a fairytale while others like a horror story. The book is a bit of both, but mainly a beautiful reflection on what having children and what being married means.
Not everyone will like this book. It’s not something you can just skim over and enjoy. This is a book that requires the reader’s full attention and one that deserves to be analyzed and internalized. If you love literary fiction and wonderful poetic writing, then I highly recommend this one.

[Ruby Tombstone Lives! · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the house upon the dirt between the lake and the woods, a young wife, (who incidentally has the power to sing objects into existence), miscarries her first child. Her husband ingests the foetus, which is hell-bent on securing for itself both a body and a mother. Thus begins an all-out war between the elements of the couple's tiny private world: dirt, house, lake, woods, father, mother, ghost, moon(s), darkness. You can throw in fingerling (foetus), foundling (human/bar hybrid), rampaging-decaying-bear and squid-whale too. It's not your traditional fairytale.

And how to describe the writing? I searched literary reviews for appropriate descriptions: "Wholly unpredictable language." "Rough poetry". "Syntax that’s just twisted enough to push us off balance." "(the) poetic hum of the prose.". That's about as close as I can get to describing Bell's style of writing, but none of these phrases do the book justice.

My favourite part of the book is comprised of three very short chapters consisting almost entirely of short paragraphs beginning with, "And in this room:" followed by a description of a room's contents which represents one aspect of the couple's relationship. Room by room, Bell maps out the whole woeful tale of a marriage doomed to failure.

There are some flaws to the book - experiments that don't quite pay off, repetitive or unnecessary parts to the story, contradictions, sections that try just a little too hard to be cute, but you know what? I don't care. Because when I look back on this book, it'll be the beautiful, terrible imagery, the melancholic tone and the poetic style of prose that I'll remember. Plus maybe the rampaging decaying bear and enigmatic squid whale thing.

[Dottie B · Rating 1 out of 5]

Is this a Keanu Reeves movie? Lol! You know he played Johnny Utah in a little movie called Point Break. And graduated from a little university in that movie called... wait for it... THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY! (Go Buckeyes!) This book reminds me of how our Glorious Buckeyes lost to those cheating Hokies two weeks ago at VA Tech. You know Michael Vick went to VA Tech. And he fights dogs. Shame!

The guy who wrote this book should have been a lawyer or a doctor, or somebody successful. Something that a father would be proud of! Not this gibberish. Did you go to school for this Matthew? Because I think you need to. Have you heard of this thing called "CLARITY"? My English teacher taught me this when I was in second grade and it was invaluable to me. Never use two words when you could say it in one! OR another way to put it: DON'T MAKE YOUR SENTENCES SOUND LIKE POTTY WATER.

I do like the way Matthew parts his hair. He is certainly trained in the ways of a comb. Guess he picked something up in school.

Anyway, curious to see what you think.

[Mary Harju · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the best books of the summer--maybe even the year! It is truly epic, blending archetypes, mythology, and a dreamlike confrontation of excruciatingly personal dilemmas. A husband and wife come together and apart, making children, fighting against nature, and finally fighting with nature against each other. The theme of memory is continually present, being shaped and honed continually by the action taking place. Anyone who's been in a long-term relationship will come across painful flashes of truth throughout. Bell's language is musical, working it's way around from the simple to the erudite. Anyone needing refreshment from the standard, run-of-the-mill contemporary novel should read this one.

[Katie · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF

In the House Upon the Dirt Between The Lake And The Woods was written by Matt Bell and published in 2013. It is a magical realism novel about parenthood and marriage centering on a couple struggling to have a child.

I’ll be honest, I just did not like this novel. It was irritating and I couldn’t connect with it. It was about some serious topics but I didn’t like the way it was done. Pretentious but not in a good way. I got about halfway through and just didn’t want to waste my time anymore. I’m not one to DNF books, but I just figured I shouldn’t waste my time reading things I don’t really want to read.

I feel like I need to be more careful going down my to read list. I have put so much on there just out of simple curiosity and maybe I need to be a bit pickier.

[Molly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this. At first I was worried I wouldn't be able to get into it—Bell strips everything of proper name, all features of detail. We know little except that there are woods, and dirt, and lake, and house. The only granular information readers get is bodily: Bell does not skimp on anatomical information. Anyway, though it is fable-like in its very conscious simplicity, it is enough. A beautiful, terrible, sad, and gut-curdling book.

[Hayley DeRoche · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a lucid dream, a long moan of grief swollen with waking dreams and horror and slick loss, coppery blood, a howling tumble through black salty waves. It is a bear's roar of pain and anger. It is a quiet seething. Good god read this, read it slowly, read it as it wanders through rooms and worlds.

[Clark Knowles · Rating 5 out of 5]

you can read a better formatted version of this at www.clarkknowles.com

I'm not a reviewer of books, merely a reader. I read carefully, of course, as someone who writes must read. But I've never been much of a reviewer. For the most part, I don't really read a lot of reviews either. I tend to find new books through recommendations and quite often, through acquaintances. That's how I found Matt Bell's new book In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods. I know Matt through Facebook and Twitter. I've met him once for a few moments at the Dzanc table at the AWP conference. I heard about his new book through social media. And then my friend Michele Filgate--a writer's champion like no other--tweeted one day that Matt's new book, his first novel, was stunning. Since then, I've seen easily a dozen reviews about the work. Nearly all of them are deserved raves. When I finished reading the novel myself, I wanted to write something, but what can a non-reviewing reader write about a book that hasn't already been said in a dozen or more reviews by qualified reviewers? Here's what I stumbled onto:


When I pick up a book, I want to have my socks not off. When I finished ITHUTDBTLATW, my socks had been obliterated.
Here is a sentence from early in the book: By the time the foundling began to sing my wife's simplest songs I had learned to restrain the fingerling, but always he watched for his chances, and soon all my angers were ulcered inside me, and one by one the fingerling sought their increased company, in whatever pits they burned their slow language. Read that aloud. Read it slowly. You MUST read it slowly.
Speaking of reading slowly. Is anyone reading slowly any more? Stop speed reading, people. I keep entering that Goodreads contest where you challenge yourself to read a certain number of books each year. I can never keep up with my own expectations. It's too much pressure. I read slow. Get over it. How can you not want to read a book like Matt's Bell's ITHUTDBTLATW slowly? If you read this book and you read it quickly, you didn't read it.
I've never read anything quite like this book. Each review I've seen of Matt's book tries to reference a few other books like it. There are no books like it. I tried to think of a book like it. I failed. There is a fantastic book by Stanley Crawford titled The Log of the S.S. Mrs. Unguentine born from the same unreachable cosmos, but it is nothing like Matt's book.
With apologies to Faulkner, this may be the best piece of American fiction ever written about a bear. But the book isn't really about a bear. Nor is the bear always a...oh, just go read it. Trying to explain it takes the magic away.
Many people use the word mythic or myth when writing about this book. I think that is the wrong word to use.
Many people have called the prose lyric, too. Lyric seems to small a word. I was trying to find a word that was closer to "music" but failed. Music might be the right word. Certainly, the language concerns songs and singing. Certainly, the prose has it's own lyricism. But none of those words really fit.
I'm by no means a Carl Jung scholar, but I've read his book Man and His Symbols. In that book, written for the lay-person, he says that there are certain symbols that bubble up from man's unconscious. Not his subconscious. Deeper than that. Further away than any piddly ol' subconscious. Way down deep in the ooze. The primordial soup. Jung says those images appear to us in our dreams. That idea fits Matt Bell's novel better than myth. Myths are only as old as man. ITHUTDBTLATW, while about the realities of the flesh, comes from a place before man. Before our stories.
There is no way a review or a blog post can adequately summarize this book for you. If you see someone try, run the other direction. I went into this book with only the barest hint of an idea about the path the story would take. And that hint was shattered in the first ten pages. After that, I was just along for the ride.
Primal. That' the right word. Not mythic or lyric or post-post or meta or absurdist or magically realistic. None of those lit-class words fit. It's primal, before the dawn stuff.
It's haunting, too. And beautiful. As violent and fierce as some of the sections are, there is also just a lot of beauty. The whole book is beautiful. The last fifty pages are so beautiful it will hurt your feelings.
I talk to my writing students all the time about taking risks and following their creative paths wherever they lead. I can think of no better example of such a thing happening as Matt Bell's novel. He followed his imagination and recorded this primal music. That makes it sound like it poured out of him in one sitting. I know that's not the case. I know he worked his ass off getting this book right, getting the words and sentences right. He worked so hard on this book that it looks like he never had to work on it.
I closed the book and the first thought that ran through my head: I want to write better stories. I don't want to do what Matt's done, but his book made me want to make strong art.
I don't know if this book is for every reader, but it's for me. I like that it's difficult and rewarding and that I can't stop thinking about the final moments. I'm going to tell everyone about it. Matt's an incredibly nice person and a pretty tireless citizen in the writing community. He deserves all the good things being said about him. This work deserves all the good things people are saying about it. Go read it. But read it slowly. Who cares if it takes you, like it did me, three weeks. Sometimes I read the same page two or three times. It's that damn good.
Thank you, Matt Bell, for this book.
And yes, I know this was only supposed to be a top ten list. Sue me.

[Krista · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods is a strange and twisted narrative; a lost Brothers Grimm from the pre-sanitised days of a medieval Black Forest; a time when it was perfectly reasonable to tell tucked-in children about a huntsman chopping open the conscious wolf's belly to free Little Red. This is not a fable – with some aphoristic kernel at its center – but a fairy tale; red in tooth and claw and bursting through the limits of the plausible.

It begins with a young married couple, unnamed, who have left their families and travelled to an unreal and virgin hinterland in which to begin their lives together. While the husband fells trees to build their house, the wife has a violent encounter with a cave bear that leaves them without material possessions, but grants the wife the ability to sing anything into being. When she suffers a series of miscarriages, the wife sings down the destruction of their world, and as the husband continues to pressure her to try and try again for a baby, the wife turns to subterfuge to grant his wish. As a meditation on grief and loss, gender roles and marital expectations, In the House has much to say.

What if I could become deep father and she deep mother and the foundling or the fingerling our deep child, and what if the whole world I had known – all that lake and dirt and house and woods and bear and what was not a bear, all that father and mother and child and ghost-child and moon and moons – what if all that was failed forever, doomed by our years of childlessness, our despair over those long years?

Yet In the House doesn't present a straightforward allegory, but rather, is relentless in its offering of outlandish ideas; each sentence wondrous strange, but the paragraphs somehow not adding up to something more. Perhaps it should be approached like a book of poetry: consumed in smallish chunks and only expecting the whole to be vaguely cohesive. I cannot deny that I was swept along by paragraphs like this one:

At the sound of my voice, the bear slipped, staggered, the front of her body lower than the back and now sliding sideways, and as I tightened my grip on the pommel of a protruding shoulder blade, the bone shattered, became a handful of dust. The bear cried out, bent the wide wedge of her head back upon me, and she was near blind then too, one eye clouded, the long-drooping other caked with layered rheum and salt, grinding as it turned in its orbit. She opened her mouth to make some warning, but there was so little growl left in her, too little to waste. Snot dripped from her caved nostrils, and the remains of her lips drooled white clumps of thirsty spit, and the cords in her neck jumped between her bones, so that I could see her stretched muscles working her toothless face, that countenance no less fearsome for its lack of skin, of underlying blood with which to make its hate known, and to that face I said, I'm sorry.

Yes, this is a lot of quoting, but for a work like this, it seems only fair to let author Matt Bell speak for himself. In the end, I can only say that I was enjoying In the House while I was reading it, but struggled to get through it, and upon reflection, didn't get much out of it but an admiration for its language.

And yet! And always, and no matter. All that was ended, and this too.

[Jaime Boler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading Matt Bell’s first novel In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, I often looked up from the book and blinked furiously in confusion. I expected to see a house with myriad rooms, a strange sky above me, a lake in the distance, and a wooded green. Instead, my own familiar environs surrounded me. That is just how powerful the setting is in Bell’s dreamlike, fabled, and beautiful debut. The story of a marriage and its collapse become much more as Bell infuses myth, allegory, and symbolism into his story, transforming the work into something else entirely.

A couple marries and, longing to get away from the rest of the world, moves to a bizarre land. The husband builds them a house, which the wife improves upon not by her hands but with her voice. If the husband starts building a room, for example, the wife can simply sing the rest of the space into being. For a time, despite the presence of a bear, a presence that looms over the entire novel, they are harmonious. Yet, their family is incomplete.

He longs for a child; she tries to give him one, but fulfilling that longing is not easy as her every pregnancy fails. The wife senses that she and her husband are slowly drifting further and further away from one another. Determined to save her marriage, the wife sings a son into existence. When the husband discovers the horrible truth of the child’s origins, he goes in search of his wife and their “foundling.”

As the husband walks through the house his wife built, now abandoned by them, Bell shows us the remnants of a failed marriage. “And in this room,” Bell writes, “The sound of my wife’s knuckle first sliding beneath the beaten silver of that ring, a sound never before heard, or else forgotten amidst all the other business of our wedding day.” Behind each door the husband opens is a different and striking scene. Each room holds a memory, a recollection the husband has long forgotten, but which the wife tucks away.

In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods may seem otherworldly, but the story is actually very familiar and recognizable. “As her side of our bedchamber grew some few inches, I did what little I could to right our arrangement, tugged hard at the blankets that barely covered the widened bed—until once again all things were distributed evenly, even as they were somehow also further apart.”

The debut is a simple story of love, marriage, parenthood, and aging amplified by mystery, lore, and imagery. A fabulous and fantastical journey into the heart of a husband and wife and into the unknown, In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods is by turns dark, mysterious, and foreboding. Bell imbues such imagination and brilliance into this tale. Bell provides a real insight into ourselves, and therein lies the real beauty of the story.

As the years pass and the couple gets older, the wife can no longer remember her husband or the foundling. Sadly, she cannot even remember the songs she once sang. Most arresting to me was the squid the husband turned into as he swam into the depths of the murky lake, his aches and pains and age dissolving away. Muted passages like these spoke volumes to me and lend the narrative richness and power.

Reminiscent of the work of Aimee Bender and Karen Russell, In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods has already garnered attention from the Indie Next list, choosing it as one of its selections for July. Bell’s lyrical language, his crystal clarity, and his sharp and colorful setting explain what all the fuss is about and herald the arrival of a major new literary talent.

When you open In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, you leave your world behind and enter a shadowy and forbidding landscape. And you will be so glad you did.

[Brenda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Readers who could appreciate Sarah Shun-lien Bynum’s Madeleine is Sleeping and Helen Oyeyemi’s Mr. Fox are also likely to possess the ability to go with the flow of lyrical strangeness that sustains Matt Bell’s In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods.

I should mention that I am a poet who is also a fiction writer and scholar—and I frequently compose in multiple genres at once. Therefore, I appreciate hybridity as well as interstitiality. I don’t need to know where a novel is going from the outset and I don’t necessarily need it to go anywhere so long as its world is compellingly imagined and crafted as it is in Bell's fiction where even the dirt demonstrates feyness.

Bell's unnamed characters are mythic in stature. They include a violent anti-father who seems as likely as Cronus to devour his children as well as a pseudo-Gaia figure who sings environment into being, but grows desperate to gestate a living child in her uterus. Other inhabitants in forest and lake include a grotesquely degenerating great bear and a mystical squid-kracken as well as childlings in various stages of development.

Bell's story involves grief, longing, jealousy, suspicion, desire, revenge, hope, and resilience.

I do want to provide one sample of Bell’s effusive language without giving away too much of the psychological transformations that occur.

Prior to the following scene, the male narrator has been festering with the spirit of an internal Cain that has driven him to excessive violence. Here, he witnesses a resurrection of former victims:

“…then again the bear shook its hackles, again it roared until all the woods and my wife’s moon shook around us, and still there came more sound from the bear, more spit-flecked thunder and command, and then from the surrounding graves came that exodus I knew nightly happened but which I had never before seen. As I watched, broken-backed deer and elk and moose pushed forth from the forest floor, and then cougars and muskrats, wolves and coyotes, beavers and squirrels and rabbits and skunks and chipmunks and wild goats and boars, partridge and pheasant and peacock and grouse and all other manners of beast and bird, each called by the bear from whatever shallow place I had buried their shells. I recoiled as they stumble-rushed into the thickets or failed to take flight, for all the wrongs I had done now came past me on all sides, their injuries grotesque, and yet how I would commit the same wrongs again, how I knew I would: The wants that had prompted me to break their bones and beaks, to rip their fur and feathers, to taste their oddest parts, none were resolved, and when I was remade I too might be less than I once was.”

There is a savage rush to the mythos Bell invents. I cannot underestimate the violence or the eloquence.

My digital copy was provided by Netgalley.

[Chaitra · Rating 3 out of 5]

I came across this book on The Book Page, and since they called it mesmerizing, I had to request for a copy from NetGalley. I found I liked the title too, to the point. There's a lake and there are woods, and upon the dirt there's a house. A labyrinthine house full of memories, mostly sad - because the couple inhabiting them have not had a great marriage. They've struggled for a baby, and they have had several miscarriages. They grow incrementally disillusioned and cruel with each other until one day the wife produces a baby, a foundling. The husband doesn't believe it's his, and he has his own reasons for being bitter. He has swallowed his first little baby-to-be in a moment of desperation, and it's now lodged in him lending its own bitterness to him. Oh, and the woods has a bear and the lake a squid, who are both not what they appear to be. And the wife's song brings their universe to life.

Weird? Very. It's epic, after a fashion. It's a frustrating read as we follow the husband making one bad choice after another, no pure driven snow him. But there's more to it than that and had I been paying the strictest attention I would probably have rated it more extremely. Reviews have described this book as mesmerizing and hypnotic. What it was for me was lulling and soporific. I made myself read 20-30 pages at a time, and I still fell fast asleep somewhere in the middle. After waking up from my short impromptu nap, I would switch to another book and I'd be wide awake. I don't mean this in a bad way, not strictly at least. There was something to the way the book is composed that was calm and comforting, which probably made it easier for me to read it. It's not a book for a woman pregnant otherwise, there's violent imagery aplenty, and most of it directed towards children (born and unborn). The parents do the most desperate things, and when they do have a baby in front of them, they're still mean and nasty. And all those miscarriages. It should have been nightmare inducing. It wasn't. I was anesthetized by the cadence of the book's prose.

So all in all, even though it was a bit of a struggle to get through, I still ended up liking it. I'm probably not making the best of cases in support of the book, but it's something I'm really glad I read. I will get around to reading it again as it should be read (wide awake and as much as possible, in one sitting) once my baby is born. Three stars.

I received a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

[Christy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Matt Bell's In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods is a dreamy and poetic story. The novel is not a quick read and I'm not entirely sure yet what I think of it, but it is frequently rewarding. It tells of the costs of marriage, of the ways relationships stunt and twist us, the ways our expectations of each other warp us. It tells of the desire for family and the pains this desire brings when thwarted and when fulfilled. It tells of the ways that our bodies betray us and the ways that our bodies both are us (telling the stories of our lives, shaping our choices and our destinies) and are not us (malleable, not always easily recognizable). It tells of the various kinds of creation available to us as humans – represented by the wife's ability to sing things into being, the husband's building and craftsmanship, conception, childbirth – even when these creations are not permanent.

Most significantly, though, it tells of memory in its many forms. Memory unites people; it also can divide when our memories do not coincide. Memory can allow us to grow and build on past experiences; it can sometimes, however, be an anchor that prevents us from moving on. Memory is a form of creation; but the loss of memory allows for new creations as well.

There are many ideas and images here that made me stop and reflect. The construction of the novel – characters with no names, only titles (wife, foundling, bear); lists of experiences and feelings that read like poetry; a certain amount of distance from the characters; a descriptive style that highlights the generic at least as much as the specific – lends it a mythic feel which serves to further highlight the novel's scope and thoughtfulness. This is not a book to rush through, but a book to savor and perhaps even to re-read.

[Megan]

i really love Matt's short fiction, have taught WOLF PARTS a few times now, and had been looking forward to reading his first novel all summer -- even saved it as a reward for finishing up a bunch of other stuff. i'm disappointed.

the epic mythicality of the narrative is at times quite awesome (i particularly enjoyed the squid-whale) and there is a lot to love in its fearless gruesomeness. but ultimately i couldn't get past the narrative's reification of masculine/feminine principles, its obsession with WIFE/MOTHER, HUSBAND/FATHER, SON/CHILD, especially the association of the wife figure with blood and the moon (a blood moon, actually). in the logic of the myth, there can only ever be one (male/female) couple, with child. possibly the most heteronormative novel i've read in years, despite its heavy weirdness. i also had a hard time with the narrative voice, which is humorless and very self-serious.

i know a ton of people love this book -- interested to hear responses. i wonder if this is one of those books/experiences i will appreciate more with distance? i'll report back.