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How They Were Found
In this debut collection, Matt Bell draws from a wide range of genres to create stories that are both formally innovative and imaginatively rich. In one, a 19th-century minister follows ghostly instructions to build a mechanical messiah. In another, a tyrannical army commander watches his apocalyptic command slip away as the memories of his men begin to fade and fail. Elsewhere, murders are indexed, new worlds are mapped, fairy tales are fractured and retold and then fractured again.
Throughout these thirteen stories, Bell's careful prose burrows at the foundations of his characters' lives until they topple over, then painstakingly pores over the wreckage for what rubbled humanity might yet remain to be found.
Throughout these thirteen stories, Bell's careful prose burrows at the foundations of his characters' lives until they topple over, then painstakingly pores over the wreckage for what rubbled humanity might yet remain to be found.
243 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 2010
11 people are currently reading
1319 people want to read
About the author
Matt Bell
39 books1,690 followersMatt 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.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 61 reviews
April 3, 2016
Matt Bell's collection of short stories defies classification.
Bell experiments with structure. For example, "Her Ennead," in which a woman comes to terms with a mysterious phenomenon, is like a prose poem in nine stanzas. The title is an important clue to both the theme and the structure, but I'm not going to tell you everything, or I will spoil the author's elaborately constructed little joke. (Stop grinning like that, Matt!) And "Ten Scenes from a Movie Called Mercy," explores the connection between written narrative and film and does it about as successfully as one can do without resorting to a multimedia presentation. But perhaps the most daring feat is the last story; "An Index of How Our Family was Killed" is presented in a series of entries reminiscent of Flaubert's Dictionary of Received Ideas.
Bell also tries various genres. "The Cartographer's Girl" is a nostalgic love story that tears at the heartstrings. His other tales about male-female relations can get much darker however. In "The Leftover," Allison contemplates how her life might have turned out had circumstances in her life been different—but this isn't a feel-good Jimmy Stewart film! "Dredge" is even more extreme, as Punter's obsession with a girl becomes absolutely chilling. And guys, once you read "Mantodea," you'll think twice about "picking up chicks in bars"!
"Wolf Parts" is a re-interpretation of a well-known children's story, but to call it a "fractured fairytail tale" would be doing it an injustice. Bell explores alternative scenarios and endings that were unexpected even for me. And I'm saying this as someone who has seen an entire book devoted to the analysis and various versions of the Red Riding Hood story.
And there are some rather bleak but fascinating post-apocalyptic stories. "The Receiving Tower" is the story of a man pitted against a grim environment, a tyrannical superior and a mysterious phenomenon which obstructs his search for truth. "His Last Great Gift" tells the tragic tale of a prophet guided by mysterious forces and misunderstood by nearly everyone around him.
Finally, Bell experiments with narrative voice. In "The Receiving Tower," there is a good attempt to reflect the narrator's growing confusion. The first-person narrative voice may be a little too articulate in fact, but the story succeeds nonetheless. Another confused protagonist shows us how he tries his best to figure out the rules of a cruel game in "Hold on to your Vacuum." In "Ten Scenes" and "The Collectors," parts of the stories are told in the second person to excellent effect. And in some of the other stories, especially "Dredge," the detached third-person narrative voice adds to the impact.
This collection of short stories, though not without some minor technical faults, is brilliantly executed in vigorous and often poetic prose. It is an ambitious undertaking and it is experimental in the best sense of the word.
Bell experiments with structure. For example, "Her Ennead," in which a woman comes to terms with a mysterious phenomenon, is like a prose poem in nine stanzas. The title is an important clue to both the theme and the structure, but I'm not going to tell you everything, or I will spoil the author's elaborately constructed little joke. (Stop grinning like that, Matt!) And "Ten Scenes from a Movie Called Mercy," explores the connection between written narrative and film and does it about as successfully as one can do without resorting to a multimedia presentation. But perhaps the most daring feat is the last story; "An Index of How Our Family was Killed" is presented in a series of entries reminiscent of Flaubert's Dictionary of Received Ideas.
Bell also tries various genres. "The Cartographer's Girl" is a nostalgic love story that tears at the heartstrings. His other tales about male-female relations can get much darker however. In "The Leftover," Allison contemplates how her life might have turned out had circumstances in her life been different—but this isn't a feel-good Jimmy Stewart film! "Dredge" is even more extreme, as Punter's obsession with a girl becomes absolutely chilling. And guys, once you read "Mantodea," you'll think twice about "picking up chicks in bars"!
"Wolf Parts" is a re-interpretation of a well-known children's story, but to call it a "fractured fairy
And there are some rather bleak but fascinating post-apocalyptic stories. "The Receiving Tower" is the story of a man pitted against a grim environment, a tyrannical superior and a mysterious phenomenon which obstructs his search for truth. "His Last Great Gift" tells the tragic tale of a prophet guided by mysterious forces and misunderstood by nearly everyone around him.
Finally, Bell experiments with narrative voice. In "The Receiving Tower," there is a good attempt to reflect the narrator's growing confusion. The first-person narrative voice may be a little too articulate in fact, but the story succeeds nonetheless. Another confused protagonist shows us how he tries his best to figure out the rules of a cruel game in "Hold on to your Vacuum." In "Ten Scenes" and "The Collectors," parts of the stories are told in the second person to excellent effect. And in some of the other stories, especially "Dredge," the detached third-person narrative voice adds to the impact.
This collection of short stories, though not without some minor technical faults, is brilliantly executed in vigorous and often poetic prose. It is an ambitious undertaking and it is experimental in the best sense of the word.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 26, 2013
This is a fantastic collection of short stories. Matt Bell shows a great deal of range in styles and settings -- from the OuLiPo influenced "An Index of How Our Family Was Killed," to the extended and subdued horror of "The Receiving Tower," from the fantastically rearranged story of Red Riding Hood in "Wolf Parts," to the nightmarish story of the Collyer brothers, historical hoarders extraordinaire, in "The Collectors." As a writer of short fiction, Matt Bell contains multitudes. The range of the worlds he creates in this collection, and the consistently high level at which he is writing throughout, are impressive. I raced through the collection, and am planning to re-read it soon. Recommended to adventurous readers willing to go wherever Bell takes them.
December 4, 2013
(insert my usual preamble about my eh-ness about short story collections)
That said, again, this book has some of the problems I normally have with short story collections, but there is a difference. Where too many authors have story collections that end up blending into what is basically the same story just told a bunch of different ways with some different characters and things happening and they might all seem different on the surface they are just treading on the same ground. See for example the suburban / familial angst authors, or the great but basically unhappy, drunk and smoking stories of say Raymond Carver, or the set something up so that there can be a ironic O. Henry-esque twist sort of story. These are just a few types, the science fiction story can be thrown in here, the George Sauders-esque surreal story, the edgy drinkin' druggin' fightin' & fuckin' of the Bukowski descendants, etc. It's not the authors fault that so many collections have stories that just blend into one another, it's just that they have this authorial voice and well it's the same voice in most of the stories, even if sometimes they are holding something in front of their mouth to get it to sound a little different.
This collection isn't like that. Matt Bell takes on a variety of different types of stories, he takes from different genres and while there is a 'voice' that runs through most of these stories, it feels like each story is an attempt at doing something formally different. The tone of most of the stories is fairly bleak, the world either the whole world, or just the personal world of the characters seems quite often on the brink of total destruction, but how he gets to these points varies. When an author keeps trying new things though sometimes some of the attempts are going to fail with certain readers (well with me, maybe you will love all the stories. Maybe you will hate them).
When the collection is at its low points the reading isn't unenjoyable or tedious, it's just more of a why do I care about this? But since they are only short stories and I have a fairly decent attention span I can keep going through twenty pages of I'm not really loving this, I can't get into this, or whatever goes on in my head when I'm reading something that isn't fully engaging without getting angry at the book for not delivering one hundred percent pure unadulterated Entertainment. To be fair, the stories I liked least were the ones, I didn't get. The ones that didn't seem to have an opening for me to squeeze understanding into. I'm not always the best reader, I read sometimes in less than optimal conditions, like squeezed into a subway car during rush hour, so it's quite possible I could have enjoyed the stories more if I gave them more attention. Sometimes, too, the stories that I wasn't enjoying too much for say the first half or more came together in a satisfying way towards the end.
But why dwell on the negative? This collection has some really great stories in it, and they are worth reading this book to get to. I just took a short break from writing this review to leaf through the book, and I realized that I liked more of the stories than I thought I did. Even ones that I thought were only so-so when I first read them, looking back at the titles and leafing through the pages I realized that they almost all had some great moment, and with the longest (and maybe most so-so story) clocking in at just under forty pages, it's an impressive feat that there are so many awesome moments in such a small number of pages (13 stories, 238 pages).
Why can't I be one of those reviewers who do a great job with short story collections? Why can't I muster up the energy to review each story? Why must I just turn every review into a tedious exercise of vomiting everything insignificant thought I have onto the page to be posted unedited?
Fuck.
Still with me?
My favorite story in the collection is probably the last one. Which surprises me a little bit because it's not really a story in the traditional sense. "An index of How Our Family Was Killed" is just what the title promises, it's an index about a family of five that has had three of its members murdered, separately. It's an index of trying to understand what happened and how to continue surviving when you're part of a family that has a tendency to get killed violently.
Insurance, policies, as in, Good luck getting one, if you're me. They never tell you that being from a family of murder victims is a risk factor, but it is.
The whole 'story' is just an alphabetical list of what could be the index for a personal dealing with tragedy. It's a list composed with what I kept thinking of as an Oulipo sort of constraints, it's alphabetical and it manages to unfold a story through mere pointers that generally destroy the rule of show don't tell, it tells just enough to spark the imagination to make up its own narrative to support this index. At moments when reading this I was amazed at the construction, maybe I was giving the formal aspects too much credit, and maybe these entries could have been jumbled up in any order and basically done the same thing, but I like to think that there is a careful unfolding here and there is a part of me that loves shit like this, just because it's tough enough to tell a good story, it's even more difficult when you have to tell the story plus keep everything within some narrow range of what you can or can't do.
Most of the other stories are more traditional than this one, quite often they have some post-modern or meta-fiction playing around going on, but they could be looked at by an average reader and be recognized as a story. I'm really sorry I'm not the sort of reviewer who reviews each story in a collection, I think this book does deserve that kind of treatment, but I'm just too lazy.
I have no idea where I'm going with this review. Maybe one day I'll try to make it better, but probably not. The collection is better than this review.
Resist denouement, resist the solving of mysteries and the revealing of truths, because it is only through these that you may be judged.
October 12, 2013
The burly man finishes his can of beer and wonders aloud why there’s a dead girl in the fridge. The wolf tells him what do you expect at this time of the year, sirloin? They continue to leaf through the latest catalogue of lawn furniture which arrived that morning.
No! – let’s for once resist the ventriloquial delights of cheap parody. Instead let’s say this collection has four great stories in it, which is four more than a lot of other books you could mention, and a sprinkling of ones which frankly left me slightly irritated as they appear to have been delivered by those jokers at Dial-a-Weird Express Literary Deliveries. Like – a woman who split up with Jeff, her boyfriend, but kind of misses him, finds that a non-speaking four foot version of him has moved into her apartment. Really. Little Jeff appears to be composed of all the bad habits she got normal-sized Jeff to quit, like smoking and dropping underwear all over the place. But hey, she loves little Jeff and she’s so glad he’s there. He’s great in bed too, except when he keeps on shrinking.
Okay, this must be some kind of extended metaphor all about people persisting in changing their partners’ behaviour to the point where they become so bland and boring they don’t like them any more, but I dunno, it was just silly. And philosophical-feminist rewritings of Little Red Riding Hood just make me pull out tufts of hair and grind my molars. There are about five of that sort but the four great ones are some of the best things I read all year. This has been such a good year for discovering new American short story writers, from the red meat of meth death hick lit to the further edge of goggling trippy fancypants. I can't tell you how throbbingly jealous I am of the bounding vitality of current American writing.
My favourites :
Hold on to your Vacuum
Dredge (I guess many writers like to do a necrophilia story, from Poe to H P Lovecraft to Barbara Gowdy to Cormac McCarthy etc, but this one was creepy to the max)
The Collectors ( this was about (real life) Homer & Langley Collyer, exactly the same as in Homer and Langley by E L Doctorow; don’t know which came first. A bit like when Antz and A Bug’s Life came out at the same time. Anyway, a really beautifully written story about rotting, decay and putrescence. Mmmmm!)
An Index of How Our Family Was Killed (the old index-as-short-story idea already done very well by Borges & Ballard & Perec but yes, done crackingly well here.)
So get this from the library & read the above four. Or maybe e-readers let you download individual stories like on iTunes you can buy specific tracks and not the whole album. I don't know but it seems logical.
No! – let’s for once resist the ventriloquial delights of cheap parody. Instead let’s say this collection has four great stories in it, which is four more than a lot of other books you could mention, and a sprinkling of ones which frankly left me slightly irritated as they appear to have been delivered by those jokers at Dial-a-Weird Express Literary Deliveries. Like – a woman who split up with Jeff, her boyfriend, but kind of misses him, finds that a non-speaking four foot version of him has moved into her apartment. Really. Little Jeff appears to be composed of all the bad habits she got normal-sized Jeff to quit, like smoking and dropping underwear all over the place. But hey, she loves little Jeff and she’s so glad he’s there. He’s great in bed too, except when he keeps on shrinking.
Okay, this must be some kind of extended metaphor all about people persisting in changing their partners’ behaviour to the point where they become so bland and boring they don’t like them any more, but I dunno, it was just silly. And philosophical-feminist rewritings of Little Red Riding Hood just make me pull out tufts of hair and grind my molars. There are about five of that sort but the four great ones are some of the best things I read all year. This has been such a good year for discovering new American short story writers, from the red meat of meth death hick lit to the further edge of goggling trippy fancypants. I can't tell you how throbbingly jealous I am of the bounding vitality of current American writing.
My favourites :
Hold on to your Vacuum
Dredge (I guess many writers like to do a necrophilia story, from Poe to H P Lovecraft to Barbara Gowdy to Cormac McCarthy etc, but this one was creepy to the max)
The Collectors ( this was about (real life) Homer & Langley Collyer, exactly the same as in Homer and Langley by E L Doctorow; don’t know which came first. A bit like when Antz and A Bug’s Life came out at the same time. Anyway, a really beautifully written story about rotting, decay and putrescence. Mmmmm!)
An Index of How Our Family Was Killed (the old index-as-short-story idea already done very well by Borges & Ballard & Perec but yes, done crackingly well here.)
So get this from the library & read the above four. Or maybe e-readers let you download individual stories like on iTunes you can buy specific tracks and not the whole album. I don't know but it seems logical.
August 1, 2016
1. 'How They Were Found' has been touted for its originality. It is not as original as it is in fact a search for originality. One can call it experimental, but its experiments are not the experiments of an wizened scientist. This is a young lad mixing chemicals in his basement lab.
2. The stories that deal with love, loss, and the responses to loss, connected the most with this reader. In the opening story, 'Cartographer's Girl,' written with a balance and restraint that is commendable, a guy commences to make a mental / actual map of the landmarks of his relationship with a girl who has left him for her own difficult reasons. The imposition of the cartographer's lexicon and the extension of the metaphor works, but it does not hide the fact that there is not much of a story to tell in the first place. One wonders if Bell just started with the idea of a cartographer, and focused only on executing the idea, rather than ever writing a decent enough story. In the other story on a similar theme, 'The Leftovers,' two young post break-up lovers learn how they have devastated each other through a magical-real trope, in which they renew their affections with a smaller, silent, more original version of each other. Once again, while accepting the strength of Bell's talent, the reader is forced to ask the question: 'Why the insertion? Why not the story itself?'
3. Experiments, innovations, contraints - anything that shifts form away from the linear narrative - makes it easier for the young writer to create because it is difficult - in most cases - for this writer to write great stuff in the organic 'Alice Munro' manner.
4. Consider the Oulipo inspired story in this collection, 'An Index of How Our Family Was Killed,' where a family's death history is presented in a masterly executed index form, a la Georges Perec. I loved it for its near perfection, but then again I asked: Am I just congratulating the form? Would I be able to read this story if it were not for the presentation? Is there really a story beneath it all? Hasn't such innovation already been overdone? Hasn't its purpose already been achieved? What desire is the writer trying to express here, by writing like this? Where does he want to belong? Does he want to be considered an imitator par excellence? Just that?
5. 'Dredge,' the story having to do with preserving dead bodies, was the stand-out story of the collection. Bell manages to mix the emotional and the macabre in a totally heady mix, while not letting go of the narrative. The force of the story is stronger than its aura of style, which works wonders. This one deserves to be anthologized.
6. Two chapbook length productions (also published as chapbooks earlier) - 'Wolf Parts' and 'The Collectors' - are experiments in fairy tale subversion and myth-making respectively, and deserve to be treated as experiments. The merit here is in what these stories must have taught the writer about his writing, rather than what they convey to the reader. I was unimpressed by
In both these stories, the macabre and the grotesque about. Both stay deliberately senseless. 'Wolf Parts' is, frankly, a pain to read through. 'The Collectors' has some beautiful moments.
7. The short short 'Mantodea' is an absolute joke. A much ravaged man has a pseudo erotic adventure with the mouth of a lady at a bar. Total mindfuck! Don't know why it even exists.
8. I found the two stories 'The Receiving Tower' and 'His Last Great Gift' difficult to evaluate. It is not possible to enjoy these pieces in the usual sense of enjoyment. In the first one, a weak Tundra landscape is bleakened even further by post-apocalyptic timing, and the characters suffer with loss of memory and a longing for that which is no longer remembered. The craft is good, the content meh! The other story, 'His Last Great Gift' seems to be about a prophet trying to construct a miracle, only to meet an ignominious end. I challenge anyone to make any sense of the symbolisms present in this story - it deliberately keeps all its balls in the air, irritating the reader with the semblance of meanings, even Biblical connections. Maybe that is the intended effect. For this reader, it seemed like prose practice.
January 13, 2017
If you liked this book, you might also enjoy:
✱ Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls
✱ Pretty Monsters: Stories
✱ Somewhere Beneath Those Waves
★★★★☆ The Cartographer’s Girl
★★★★★ The Receiving Tower
★★☆☆☆ His Last Great Gift
★★★★☆ Her Ennead
★★☆☆☆ Hold On To Your Vacuum
★★☆☆☆ Dredge
★★★★☆ Ten Scenes From A Movie Called Mercy
★★☆☆☆ Wolf Parts
★★☆☆☆ Mantodea
★★★★☆ The Leftover
★★★★☆ A Certain Number of Bedrooms, A Certain Number of Baths
★★★★☆ The Collectors
★★★★★ An Index of How Our Family Was Killed
✱ Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls
✱ Pretty Monsters: Stories
✱ Somewhere Beneath Those Waves
★★★★☆ The Cartographer’s Girl
★★★★★ The Receiving Tower
★★☆☆☆ His Last Great Gift
★★★★☆ Her Ennead
★★☆☆☆ Hold On To Your Vacuum
★★☆☆☆ Dredge
★★★★☆ Ten Scenes From A Movie Called Mercy
★★☆☆☆ Wolf Parts
★★☆☆☆ Mantodea
★★★★☆ The Leftover
★★★★☆ A Certain Number of Bedrooms, A Certain Number of Baths
★★★★☆ The Collectors
★★★★★ An Index of How Our Family Was Killed
March 17, 2012
downloaded audio by Iambik for review
Listened 3/8/12 - 3/15/12
4 Stars - Strongly Recommended to fans of wicked sharp short fiction
Audio Download (approx 6 hrs)
Publisher: Iambik / Keyhole Press
Narrator: Mark F Smith
Matt Bell's How They Were Found was one of those books that sat on my to-buy list near forever but never really jumped out at me from the shelves as I was roaming the aisles of bookstores looking for something to buy.
Yet when I recently saw that Iambik had recorded it, I knew this was my chance to finally give it a whirl and procrastinate no more. Thank god for Iambik, man. If they hadn't published this, how much longer might I have gone without reading it? I shudder to think....
The stories contained within this collection deserve more than the typical reviewer-type, cliche buzz terms that run the risk of cheapening them - like "powerful" and "deeply affecting" and "compelling" - but strike me dumb if his stories aren't exactly those things. Stripped down to only the most essential words, Bell cuts to the heart of each story and paints moody, dark, twisted reflections of would-be realities.
The narrator, Mark F Smith, did a fantastic job with this collection. As the first track got underway, I couldn't help but compare his voice to that of a much more soft spoken version of Alan Heathcock (author of Volt, of whom I had the pleasure of hearing perform a reading, and who has this incredible southern preacher voice thing going for him), mixed with a little of our local radio DJ Jumpin' Jeff Walker (minus the distracting lisp thing). While this might not seem like a compliment, it actually is. His pacing and tone matched Bell's stories to near perfection. His voice became a vehicle for each story...
As with any collection, some of Bell's pieces grabbed me more strongly than others. The Cartographer's Girl, a story about a sleepwalker who disappears and the man who loves her who painfully maps out every moment and every place and every memory he can recall in order to try to find her, was one of them. Dredge, which revolves around an emotionally unstable man who starts his own investigation into the murder of the drowned girl he pulled from the lake and stored inside a freezer box, is another.
How about The Leftover, which tells the story of a woman who discovers that she actually misses and loves the things that she made her ex give up while they were still together (like smoking and leaving clothes all over the house) when those bad habits appear on the couch one day, in the form of a silent mini-version of him?
My absolute favorite story, though, is The Receiving Tower, which details the slow, mental breakdown of the men who have been searching through the static of the government's receiving tower stations for years under the orders of their heartless captain, listening for the decoded messages being sent across the airwaves, cruelly unaware of the fact that the world has ended and there is no rescue for them. It reminded me of something The Twilight Zone might have put out, back in the day...
Of course, there were stories that failed to blow me away - like Wolf Parts, which is a dark and strange take on the whole Red Riding Hood thing, and Her Ennead, which takes us through a soon-to-be-mother's wacky imaginings of what her baby will become - though I am aware that these particular stories are held in high regard by some reviewers.
No matter which of his stories you prefer, Matt consistently teases the reader something terrible by burying threads of hope within the pages of his bleak and otherwise soul crushing tales of loss and love and broken hearts. If his sparse storytelling doesn't hook you, the unique, awkward, inappropriately sentimental situations his characters find themselves in most certainly will.
I highly recommend listening to Iambik Audio's version of the book. (And, just in case that statement didn't floor you, that's actually saying a lot, coming from a previously reluctant audiobook listener, so you know, you should totally take me up on it!)
Listened 3/8/12 - 3/15/12
4 Stars - Strongly Recommended to fans of wicked sharp short fiction
Audio Download (approx 6 hrs)
Publisher: Iambik / Keyhole Press
Narrator: Mark F Smith
Matt Bell's How They Were Found was one of those books that sat on my to-buy list near forever but never really jumped out at me from the shelves as I was roaming the aisles of bookstores looking for something to buy.
Yet when I recently saw that Iambik had recorded it, I knew this was my chance to finally give it a whirl and procrastinate no more. Thank god for Iambik, man. If they hadn't published this, how much longer might I have gone without reading it? I shudder to think....
The stories contained within this collection deserve more than the typical reviewer-type, cliche buzz terms that run the risk of cheapening them - like "powerful" and "deeply affecting" and "compelling" - but strike me dumb if his stories aren't exactly those things. Stripped down to only the most essential words, Bell cuts to the heart of each story and paints moody, dark, twisted reflections of would-be realities.
The narrator, Mark F Smith, did a fantastic job with this collection. As the first track got underway, I couldn't help but compare his voice to that of a much more soft spoken version of Alan Heathcock (author of Volt, of whom I had the pleasure of hearing perform a reading, and who has this incredible southern preacher voice thing going for him), mixed with a little of our local radio DJ Jumpin' Jeff Walker (minus the distracting lisp thing). While this might not seem like a compliment, it actually is. His pacing and tone matched Bell's stories to near perfection. His voice became a vehicle for each story...
As with any collection, some of Bell's pieces grabbed me more strongly than others. The Cartographer's Girl, a story about a sleepwalker who disappears and the man who loves her who painfully maps out every moment and every place and every memory he can recall in order to try to find her, was one of them. Dredge, which revolves around an emotionally unstable man who starts his own investigation into the murder of the drowned girl he pulled from the lake and stored inside a freezer box, is another.
How about The Leftover, which tells the story of a woman who discovers that she actually misses and loves the things that she made her ex give up while they were still together (like smoking and leaving clothes all over the house) when those bad habits appear on the couch one day, in the form of a silent mini-version of him?
My absolute favorite story, though, is The Receiving Tower, which details the slow, mental breakdown of the men who have been searching through the static of the government's receiving tower stations for years under the orders of their heartless captain, listening for the decoded messages being sent across the airwaves, cruelly unaware of the fact that the world has ended and there is no rescue for them. It reminded me of something The Twilight Zone might have put out, back in the day...
Of course, there were stories that failed to blow me away - like Wolf Parts, which is a dark and strange take on the whole Red Riding Hood thing, and Her Ennead, which takes us through a soon-to-be-mother's wacky imaginings of what her baby will become - though I am aware that these particular stories are held in high regard by some reviewers.
No matter which of his stories you prefer, Matt consistently teases the reader something terrible by burying threads of hope within the pages of his bleak and otherwise soul crushing tales of loss and love and broken hearts. If his sparse storytelling doesn't hook you, the unique, awkward, inappropriately sentimental situations his characters find themselves in most certainly will.
I highly recommend listening to Iambik Audio's version of the book. (And, just in case that statement didn't floor you, that's actually saying a lot, coming from a previously reluctant audiobook listener, so you know, you should totally take me up on it!)
December 4, 2013
Matt Bell's short story collection, How They Were Found, is dark, disturbing, creative, experimental and imaginative. Some of them will make a reader feel highly uncomfortable, which only stands as a testament to the power of the writing.
Despite being slightly unimpressed with the first story in this collection, The Cartographer's Girl,* I found the rest of the stories far more enjoyable. The stories that stand out for me as being worth re-reading are The Receiving Tower, His Last Great Gift, Hold On To Your Vacuum, The Leftover, and The Collectors.
In The Receiving Tower, a group of men who are not quite sure where they are or what they're doing there gather once a week in the basement of the tower in which they live, desperate to share their memories before their minds grow inexplicably dim.
Hold On To Your Vacuum is a terrifying mix of school and video game, in which the narrator is pursued through his own memories by a mysterious man known only as Teacher, who pushes a drill bit into his skull to reset the level each time.
The Leftover is probably the most light-hearted story of the collection. Following an uneventful but devastating break-up with Jeff, Allison wakes up to find a miniature version of him in her apartment. She conducts a tentative relationship with Little Jeff as he grows smaller and more childlike, until she is left with no other option than to confront the real Jeff.
The Collectors is a fictionalised account of the real-life story of Homer and Langley Collyer, whose compulsive hoarding directly led to their lonely deaths. Bell tells their story with a strong sense of tact and respect, while still invoking the tragedy and desperation of the situation.
Bell's stories don't have morals or happy endings, and his characters are not offered a neat parcel of redemption at the end of each tale. The meaning of the stories isn't always immediately apparent, and may occur to you some time later when you're dwelling on the subject matter.
* I have since realised that in the print version of How They Were Found, The Cartographer's Girl is accompanied by symbols and annotations that do not appear when reading on the Kindle.
Despite being slightly unimpressed with the first story in this collection, The Cartographer's Girl,* I found the rest of the stories far more enjoyable. The stories that stand out for me as being worth re-reading are The Receiving Tower, His Last Great Gift, Hold On To Your Vacuum, The Leftover, and The Collectors.
In The Receiving Tower, a group of men who are not quite sure where they are or what they're doing there gather once a week in the basement of the tower in which they live, desperate to share their memories before their minds grow inexplicably dim.
Hold On To Your Vacuum is a terrifying mix of school and video game, in which the narrator is pursued through his own memories by a mysterious man known only as Teacher, who pushes a drill bit into his skull to reset the level each time.
The Leftover is probably the most light-hearted story of the collection. Following an uneventful but devastating break-up with Jeff, Allison wakes up to find a miniature version of him in her apartment. She conducts a tentative relationship with Little Jeff as he grows smaller and more childlike, until she is left with no other option than to confront the real Jeff.
The Collectors is a fictionalised account of the real-life story of Homer and Langley Collyer, whose compulsive hoarding directly led to their lonely deaths. Bell tells their story with a strong sense of tact and respect, while still invoking the tragedy and desperation of the situation.
Bell's stories don't have morals or happy endings, and his characters are not offered a neat parcel of redemption at the end of each tale. The meaning of the stories isn't always immediately apparent, and may occur to you some time later when you're dwelling on the subject matter.
* I have since realised that in the print version of How They Were Found, The Cartographer's Girl is accompanied by symbols and annotations that do not appear when reading on the Kindle.
July 1, 2011
How They Were Found is a powerful collection crossing genres and styles, but always with a distinctness to it. It's not a writer trying to fit into different modes, but a writer applying himself to stories, bending genres and conventions to his will with extraordinary ease.
The title is rather apt in that each story, at some level, is about people searching for something or someone, whether it be themselves, their mother, their lost lover, their daughter, or just a reason to keep going, to keep believing despite everything.
Wolf Parts, The Cartographer's Girl, and The Collectors, especially, epitomise that, I think, and were standouts to me, though it's hard to forget stories like His Last Great Gift and Dredge, with characters that feel so wrong they can't help but be absolutely real.
A great collection that thoroughly impressed me.
The title is rather apt in that each story, at some level, is about people searching for something or someone, whether it be themselves, their mother, their lost lover, their daughter, or just a reason to keep going, to keep believing despite everything.
Wolf Parts, The Cartographer's Girl, and The Collectors, especially, epitomise that, I think, and were standouts to me, though it's hard to forget stories like His Last Great Gift and Dredge, with characters that feel so wrong they can't help but be absolutely real.
A great collection that thoroughly impressed me.
January 31, 2011
How Who Was Found?
A book review of Matt Bell’s How They Were Found
Do I dare write about Matt Bell’s book? I mean, he’s not just a colleague—he works for my publishers! Shouldn’t I avoid it? Isn’t that kinda dangerous?
Alas, that’s what I do. I write. I share. I say stuff. So, here I go.
Remember this: I’m living on the edge.
I’m not much of an experimentalist. I’m not much of a postmodernist. I read some Experimental Fiction and roll my eyes in disdain. Some of the prose I’ve literally thrown across the room has been taught in the halls of Academia, hailed as innovative and brilliant and the wave of the future (which is, it seems, marked by futurelessness). Most recently I read something (it shall remain nameless) hailed as brilliant and I nearly went into convulsions because, well, it struck me as pretentious and meaningless. I then read Benjamin Percy’s Refresh, Refresh—which was an antidote; I’d survive the onslaught of crap. NOT ALL CONTEMPORARY FICTION SUCKS! REFRESH! REFRESH! While I do read a lot of the good old Western Canon (yeah, the problematic canon), I mostly read contemporary fiction—but it’s contemporary fiction with linear narratives, not especially cutting-edge in form.
Am I not cutting-edge? I’m living on the edge, you know.
I took some serious dips into alternative rock during college, but—in the end—I returned to classic rock. Classic Rock. I just saw that documentary, It Might Get Loud, which featured Jimmy Page, the Edge, and Jack White talking about guitars. And that film really encapsulates my musical taste: it’s what I like. I almost cried.
Oh, no. I’m not cutting-edge! I gave up the Smiths and went back to Led Zep! I think the Edge is pretty cool! I probably just sounded totally out of it by even mentioning the Smiths! They were big when I went to college! Who’s cutting-edge now? Who’s hip? One of my young friends just gave me a mix CD of the best music from the decade, and I barely recognized anything. I’m still listening to Bob Dylan.
Hey, I own CDs by The White Stripes!
I wanna be cutting-edge!
Before this gets out of hand, before I get mislabeled, before you regard me as some archaic traditionalist with scary conservative flaws and outdated aesthetics, please know this: I’m gonna live dangerously. I’m gonna talk about Matt Bell’s book.
He’s an experimental fiction-writer. I know this because I checked with him.
I’m now going to offer a working definition of cutting-edge: something is cutting-edge when it is a force to be reckoned with.
This differs from experimental, which I’m not here to define. I do, though, want to refer interested parties to a good primer. Writer Christopher Higgs—who I don’t know but I like the info I read about him (some film school, some Peace Corps in Africa, MFA in Creative Writing, working on Ph.D in Lit, married with cat named Beatrice) has written a series of posts on HTMLGIANT addressing the following question: What is Experimental Fiction? They appeared in November 2010, December 2010, and January 2011—and it sounds like more are coming. Here are the links:
http://htmlgiant.com/random/what-is-e...
http://htmlgiant.com/random/what-is-e...
http://htmlgiant.com/random/what-is-e...
Let me just thank Matt Bell for referring me to these posts. Yeah, Matt and I are in cahoots.
No, really, I asked Matt if he wrote Experimental Fiction, and then I asked him what Experimental Fiction is. I’ll just paraphrase his response, which was pretty enlightening. He acknowledged he’d be categorized that way, and suggested his book might be more properly labeled as “non-realist fiction.” Like other writers, he wasn’t super into the labeling, though he knew it was a reality.
The reality of the fiction of non-reality.
Sorry. I had to. It’s the Lorrie Moore in me.
And then he defined Experimental Fiction by kinda deferring to Higgs, though he did note something I find intriguing. About Experimental Fiction, he said (this is an e-mail from January 29, 2011),“There’s no experiment involved.” This made me wonder: Is that what I believe about fiction? Do I believe there is an experiment going on? What is the implication of having an experiment in fiction? Does that imply that there’s something to be tested, a truth to be discovered? A Truth to be had? Is Experimental Fiction ultimately fiction without an experiment? Should we really call it Non-Experimental Fiction? Should we?
Am I doing the Lorrie Moore thing again?
Well, really, I’m not in the mood for defining postmodernism and the like—though, obviously, that’s the territory we’re messing with. And I definitely don’t want to typecast my own, um, cutting-edge fiction. So, for two seconds, I too will defer to Higgs, whose cat is named Beatrice.
Higgs notes that one distinction between Experimental Fiction and the Other Stuff is the difference between a predominantly open text (unfixed meaning?) and a predominantly closed text (fixed meaning?). Check out Part I. He provides some good examples in painting. Then, later, he mentions how the Other Stuff is still wrapped up in Aristotle’s bag of tricks espoused in Poetics: our concepts of plot and character, the “show don’t tell” dictum, the emphasis on causality, the role of resolution and conflict, clarity as opposed to ambiguity, etc. My favorite line, though, is this one: “I don’t believe in truth, I believe in interpretation.” Yes, this says it all.
Onto Matt Bell’s How They Were Found.
But what did I mean by titling my review How What Was Found? Simply this: most of his writing can be categorized as Experimental and, as such, ambiguity is at its heart. As Higgs might say, It’s all open to interpretation. So, it’s not like they were found by uncovering some Truth, if you know what I mean.
Bell, more or less, affirms the absence of fixed meaning, I think. Ambiguity reigns over clarity. Matt, do you agree?
But there’s a reason why I chose this book to review. Actually, everyone has probably noticed this already. I don’t really review anything; I just use the book to talk about something I’ve always wanted to talk about. I chose this book because I get to talk about Experimental Fiction—and Led Zeppelin—and, truth/Truth be told, I liked it. I really did.
Because—here we go—it isn’t the Experimental part I’m so enamored with; it’s the cutting-edge part. Something is cutting-edge when it is a force to be reckoned with.
Matt Bell’s prose is a force to be reckoned with. A virtuoso with verbiage. That these stories in his collection are Experimental—or non-realist—isn’t probably terribly controversial. He plays with form throughout the book, which includes a “story” revealed through an alphabetized index (“An Index of How Our Family Was Killed”). It’s among my favorites. I also really loved “Dredge,” which Kyle Minor pointed out is the most conventional story, and “The Receiving Tower,” which is chilling, actually, and highly original. Innovative. Uh-oh.
There were times as I enthusiastically read, I found myself wondering about other scandalous issues: who taught this guy? Reviews have already noted his “careful” prose—and I’d second that. Careful and masterful. Where’s the scandal? Here it is: Can someone be taught to write or is it innate? Was he born with it? Where originates such wordplay, such imagination?
I should note this: As you may have guessed, I’m rather into Aristotle’s fiction-speak. I found Bell to be engaged enough in the conventions to make his collection still enjoyable, still sensible, still workable for the likes of me. I didn’t feel entirely abandoned in La-La Land the way I can feel with much Experimental Fiction. Despite the madness, if you will, of “His Last Great Gift,” there are still present the familiar cues of fiction, the use of the good things in storytelling.
One small anecdote before my grand finale. I had just read “Wolf Parts,” which plays with the story of “Little Red Riding Hood.” Much to my surprise, only hours later, I overheard my three- and four-year-olds playing around too; they were re-enacting parts of “Little Red Riding Hood.” Unprecedented! I didn’t even know they knew that story! I’ve been pretty much avoiding it, frankly. That, and “Hansel and Gretel.” So, as Alanis Morrisette might’ve asked in the nineties, “Isn’t it ironic?”
Why, yes, it is.
The Grand Finale. Despite my predisposition to dislike Experimental Fiction, I found Matt Bell’s prose cutting-edge. This was largely an aesthetic thing. I was mesmerized by the poetry of his prose, his deliberate but smooth verbiage, his originality. Just consider this passage and tell me you’re not intrigued: “Most nights, we climb to the tower’s roof to stand together beneath the satellite dishes, where we watch the hundreds of meteorites fall through the aurora and across the arctic sky. Trapped high in the atmosphere, they streak the horizon then flare out, with only the rarest among them surviving long enough to burst into either mountains or tundra, that madness of snow and ice beneath us.” That’s the opening of “The Receiving Tower,” which is beautifully bizarre. But not as bizarre as “Hold On To Your Vacuum.”
I don’t even know how to describe these stories. But I will say that I was driven. I read for the beauty of his language, mostly, but also out of fascination. I found myself fascinated by Aristotelian stuff: plot, character, setting, et al. Where would the story go next?
Since I couldn’t count on an answer, I didn’t always find out what happened next. But I kept reading, voraciously. And, for that, I’ll say that Matt Bell’s prose is a force to be reckoned with. I’m no postmodernist, but—as far as the writing of Matt Bell goes—I want to see what happens next.
A book review of Matt Bell’s How They Were Found
Do I dare write about Matt Bell’s book? I mean, he’s not just a colleague—he works for my publishers! Shouldn’t I avoid it? Isn’t that kinda dangerous?
Alas, that’s what I do. I write. I share. I say stuff. So, here I go.
Remember this: I’m living on the edge.
I’m not much of an experimentalist. I’m not much of a postmodernist. I read some Experimental Fiction and roll my eyes in disdain. Some of the prose I’ve literally thrown across the room has been taught in the halls of Academia, hailed as innovative and brilliant and the wave of the future (which is, it seems, marked by futurelessness). Most recently I read something (it shall remain nameless) hailed as brilliant and I nearly went into convulsions because, well, it struck me as pretentious and meaningless. I then read Benjamin Percy’s Refresh, Refresh—which was an antidote; I’d survive the onslaught of crap. NOT ALL CONTEMPORARY FICTION SUCKS! REFRESH! REFRESH! While I do read a lot of the good old Western Canon (yeah, the problematic canon), I mostly read contemporary fiction—but it’s contemporary fiction with linear narratives, not especially cutting-edge in form.
Am I not cutting-edge? I’m living on the edge, you know.
I took some serious dips into alternative rock during college, but—in the end—I returned to classic rock. Classic Rock. I just saw that documentary, It Might Get Loud, which featured Jimmy Page, the Edge, and Jack White talking about guitars. And that film really encapsulates my musical taste: it’s what I like. I almost cried.
Oh, no. I’m not cutting-edge! I gave up the Smiths and went back to Led Zep! I think the Edge is pretty cool! I probably just sounded totally out of it by even mentioning the Smiths! They were big when I went to college! Who’s cutting-edge now? Who’s hip? One of my young friends just gave me a mix CD of the best music from the decade, and I barely recognized anything. I’m still listening to Bob Dylan.
Hey, I own CDs by The White Stripes!
I wanna be cutting-edge!
Before this gets out of hand, before I get mislabeled, before you regard me as some archaic traditionalist with scary conservative flaws and outdated aesthetics, please know this: I’m gonna live dangerously. I’m gonna talk about Matt Bell’s book.
He’s an experimental fiction-writer. I know this because I checked with him.
I’m now going to offer a working definition of cutting-edge: something is cutting-edge when it is a force to be reckoned with.
This differs from experimental, which I’m not here to define. I do, though, want to refer interested parties to a good primer. Writer Christopher Higgs—who I don’t know but I like the info I read about him (some film school, some Peace Corps in Africa, MFA in Creative Writing, working on Ph.D in Lit, married with cat named Beatrice) has written a series of posts on HTMLGIANT addressing the following question: What is Experimental Fiction? They appeared in November 2010, December 2010, and January 2011—and it sounds like more are coming. Here are the links:
http://htmlgiant.com/random/what-is-e...
http://htmlgiant.com/random/what-is-e...
http://htmlgiant.com/random/what-is-e...
Let me just thank Matt Bell for referring me to these posts. Yeah, Matt and I are in cahoots.
No, really, I asked Matt if he wrote Experimental Fiction, and then I asked him what Experimental Fiction is. I’ll just paraphrase his response, which was pretty enlightening. He acknowledged he’d be categorized that way, and suggested his book might be more properly labeled as “non-realist fiction.” Like other writers, he wasn’t super into the labeling, though he knew it was a reality.
The reality of the fiction of non-reality.
Sorry. I had to. It’s the Lorrie Moore in me.
And then he defined Experimental Fiction by kinda deferring to Higgs, though he did note something I find intriguing. About Experimental Fiction, he said (this is an e-mail from January 29, 2011),“There’s no experiment involved.” This made me wonder: Is that what I believe about fiction? Do I believe there is an experiment going on? What is the implication of having an experiment in fiction? Does that imply that there’s something to be tested, a truth to be discovered? A Truth to be had? Is Experimental Fiction ultimately fiction without an experiment? Should we really call it Non-Experimental Fiction? Should we?
Am I doing the Lorrie Moore thing again?
Well, really, I’m not in the mood for defining postmodernism and the like—though, obviously, that’s the territory we’re messing with. And I definitely don’t want to typecast my own, um, cutting-edge fiction. So, for two seconds, I too will defer to Higgs, whose cat is named Beatrice.
Higgs notes that one distinction between Experimental Fiction and the Other Stuff is the difference between a predominantly open text (unfixed meaning?) and a predominantly closed text (fixed meaning?). Check out Part I. He provides some good examples in painting. Then, later, he mentions how the Other Stuff is still wrapped up in Aristotle’s bag of tricks espoused in Poetics: our concepts of plot and character, the “show don’t tell” dictum, the emphasis on causality, the role of resolution and conflict, clarity as opposed to ambiguity, etc. My favorite line, though, is this one: “I don’t believe in truth, I believe in interpretation.” Yes, this says it all.
Onto Matt Bell’s How They Were Found.
But what did I mean by titling my review How What Was Found? Simply this: most of his writing can be categorized as Experimental and, as such, ambiguity is at its heart. As Higgs might say, It’s all open to interpretation. So, it’s not like they were found by uncovering some Truth, if you know what I mean.
Bell, more or less, affirms the absence of fixed meaning, I think. Ambiguity reigns over clarity. Matt, do you agree?
But there’s a reason why I chose this book to review. Actually, everyone has probably noticed this already. I don’t really review anything; I just use the book to talk about something I’ve always wanted to talk about. I chose this book because I get to talk about Experimental Fiction—and Led Zeppelin—and, truth/Truth be told, I liked it. I really did.
Because—here we go—it isn’t the Experimental part I’m so enamored with; it’s the cutting-edge part. Something is cutting-edge when it is a force to be reckoned with.
Matt Bell’s prose is a force to be reckoned with. A virtuoso with verbiage. That these stories in his collection are Experimental—or non-realist—isn’t probably terribly controversial. He plays with form throughout the book, which includes a “story” revealed through an alphabetized index (“An Index of How Our Family Was Killed”). It’s among my favorites. I also really loved “Dredge,” which Kyle Minor pointed out is the most conventional story, and “The Receiving Tower,” which is chilling, actually, and highly original. Innovative. Uh-oh.
There were times as I enthusiastically read, I found myself wondering about other scandalous issues: who taught this guy? Reviews have already noted his “careful” prose—and I’d second that. Careful and masterful. Where’s the scandal? Here it is: Can someone be taught to write or is it innate? Was he born with it? Where originates such wordplay, such imagination?
I should note this: As you may have guessed, I’m rather into Aristotle’s fiction-speak. I found Bell to be engaged enough in the conventions to make his collection still enjoyable, still sensible, still workable for the likes of me. I didn’t feel entirely abandoned in La-La Land the way I can feel with much Experimental Fiction. Despite the madness, if you will, of “His Last Great Gift,” there are still present the familiar cues of fiction, the use of the good things in storytelling.
One small anecdote before my grand finale. I had just read “Wolf Parts,” which plays with the story of “Little Red Riding Hood.” Much to my surprise, only hours later, I overheard my three- and four-year-olds playing around too; they were re-enacting parts of “Little Red Riding Hood.” Unprecedented! I didn’t even know they knew that story! I’ve been pretty much avoiding it, frankly. That, and “Hansel and Gretel.” So, as Alanis Morrisette might’ve asked in the nineties, “Isn’t it ironic?”
Why, yes, it is.
The Grand Finale. Despite my predisposition to dislike Experimental Fiction, I found Matt Bell’s prose cutting-edge. This was largely an aesthetic thing. I was mesmerized by the poetry of his prose, his deliberate but smooth verbiage, his originality. Just consider this passage and tell me you’re not intrigued: “Most nights, we climb to the tower’s roof to stand together beneath the satellite dishes, where we watch the hundreds of meteorites fall through the aurora and across the arctic sky. Trapped high in the atmosphere, they streak the horizon then flare out, with only the rarest among them surviving long enough to burst into either mountains or tundra, that madness of snow and ice beneath us.” That’s the opening of “The Receiving Tower,” which is beautifully bizarre. But not as bizarre as “Hold On To Your Vacuum.”
I don’t even know how to describe these stories. But I will say that I was driven. I read for the beauty of his language, mostly, but also out of fascination. I found myself fascinated by Aristotelian stuff: plot, character, setting, et al. Where would the story go next?
Since I couldn’t count on an answer, I didn’t always find out what happened next. But I kept reading, voraciously. And, for that, I’ll say that Matt Bell’s prose is a force to be reckoned with. I’m no postmodernist, but—as far as the writing of Matt Bell goes—I want to see what happens next.
May 29, 2013
I've been on a kick recently, trying to find short story collections by little-known authors or those better known on the far outskirts of the literary canon, people pushing beyond just pure narrative and reconfiguring text to suit their own needs. Matt Bell's "How They Were Found" sounded like something I would enjoy immensely, if only for the imagination and possibly not for the writing. As far as I'm concerned, he delivered on all counts.
The majority of the collection (13 stories total) are longer pieces than I'm typically used to reading, but each piece was as engaging, if not more so, than the one that preceded it, which was a nice surprise. Often a collection can lose steam towards the final push if the pieces aren't placed properly, and while I was less enthused by two or three of the stories, the remaining ones made me an instant fan and I will certainly be checking out more of his work.
"The Cartographer's Girl" was a wonderful introduction, utilizing map notations and symbols in an effort to deconstruct a past relationship, of which there is still some mystery left lingering in the air.
"X:
X is the store where he bought the ring he never got to give her.
X is the place where he planned to propose, where he already made the reservation.
X is the speech he rehearsed, that he practiced saying slowly, carefully, so that she would not mishear even a single syllable.
X is nowhere, X is now, X is never mind.
X is everything that ever mattered.
X is all he has left."
"The Receiving Tower" seemed to be after some great "event," putting us in a snowy region with a small battalion of soldiers who were slowly losing their minds and their memories, forgetting not only their names, but their entire histories and how they ended up where they are.
"As I remember it - which is not well - young Kerr was the first to grow dim. We'd find him high in the tower's listening room, cursing at the computers, locking up console after console by failing to enter his password correctly. At night, he wandered the barracks, holding a framed portrait of his son and daughter, asking us if we knew their names, if we remembered how old they were. This is when one of us would remove the photograph from its frame so that he could read the fading scrawl on the back, the inked lines he eventually wore off by tracing them over and over and over with this fingers, after which there was no proof to quiet his queries."
"His Last Great Gift" was an unbelievably dark piece about 19th-Century minister building a machine that would be the supposed coming of God. More than just a commentary on religion through science fiction tropes, Bell does a great job of explicating the relationships between the members of this religious sect as their lives come into constant contact with each other.
"He says, When God created the world, did he try over and over and over again until he got it right? Are there castaway worlds littering the cosmos, retarded with fire and ice and failed life thrashing away in the clay?
No, there are not.
When God came to save this world, did he impregnate all of Galilee, hoping that one of those seeds would grow up to be a Messiah?
No. What god needs, God makes, and it only takes the once."
But it is "Dredge" that curled my toes back the most out of this entire collection. We follow along with the narrator as he first finds a body in a lake, removes the body, and takes it home with him, taking off on some kind of twisted detective noir tale in suburbia. Truly one of the creepiest things I've read and I appreciated the deep psychological explication of the character as things move along. While a "normal" person may not agree with every action that occurs, there's an understanding that comes by the final page that's disturbingly sweet.
There are several other solid stories here ("An Index of How Our Family Was Killed" was a particularly inspired piece), but these were the ones that really stood out to me. The entire collection as a whole is really solid and even the longer pieces didn't make me feel like I was trudging through them; I was genuinely enjoying them. "How They Were Found" is highly unsettling and highly enjoyable. I'd scoop up everything of his that you can find.
The majority of the collection (13 stories total) are longer pieces than I'm typically used to reading, but each piece was as engaging, if not more so, than the one that preceded it, which was a nice surprise. Often a collection can lose steam towards the final push if the pieces aren't placed properly, and while I was less enthused by two or three of the stories, the remaining ones made me an instant fan and I will certainly be checking out more of his work.
"The Cartographer's Girl" was a wonderful introduction, utilizing map notations and symbols in an effort to deconstruct a past relationship, of which there is still some mystery left lingering in the air.
"X:
X is the store where he bought the ring he never got to give her.
X is the place where he planned to propose, where he already made the reservation.
X is the speech he rehearsed, that he practiced saying slowly, carefully, so that she would not mishear even a single syllable.
X is nowhere, X is now, X is never mind.
X is everything that ever mattered.
X is all he has left."
"The Receiving Tower" seemed to be after some great "event," putting us in a snowy region with a small battalion of soldiers who were slowly losing their minds and their memories, forgetting not only their names, but their entire histories and how they ended up where they are.
"As I remember it - which is not well - young Kerr was the first to grow dim. We'd find him high in the tower's listening room, cursing at the computers, locking up console after console by failing to enter his password correctly. At night, he wandered the barracks, holding a framed portrait of his son and daughter, asking us if we knew their names, if we remembered how old they were. This is when one of us would remove the photograph from its frame so that he could read the fading scrawl on the back, the inked lines he eventually wore off by tracing them over and over and over with this fingers, after which there was no proof to quiet his queries."
"His Last Great Gift" was an unbelievably dark piece about 19th-Century minister building a machine that would be the supposed coming of God. More than just a commentary on religion through science fiction tropes, Bell does a great job of explicating the relationships between the members of this religious sect as their lives come into constant contact with each other.
"He says, When God created the world, did he try over and over and over again until he got it right? Are there castaway worlds littering the cosmos, retarded with fire and ice and failed life thrashing away in the clay?
No, there are not.
When God came to save this world, did he impregnate all of Galilee, hoping that one of those seeds would grow up to be a Messiah?
No. What god needs, God makes, and it only takes the once."
But it is "Dredge" that curled my toes back the most out of this entire collection. We follow along with the narrator as he first finds a body in a lake, removes the body, and takes it home with him, taking off on some kind of twisted detective noir tale in suburbia. Truly one of the creepiest things I've read and I appreciated the deep psychological explication of the character as things move along. While a "normal" person may not agree with every action that occurs, there's an understanding that comes by the final page that's disturbingly sweet.
There are several other solid stories here ("An Index of How Our Family Was Killed" was a particularly inspired piece), but these were the ones that really stood out to me. The entire collection as a whole is really solid and even the longer pieces didn't make me feel like I was trudging through them; I was genuinely enjoying them. "How They Were Found" is highly unsettling and highly enjoyable. I'd scoop up everything of his that you can find.
May 24, 2012
It took me a while to get into this book, but when I did, it was completely rewarding. There are two reasons for this. First, the book presents alternative realities that are perfectly believable. "The Leftover" is the best example of this, as the science fiction in the story is secondary to the character changes that are going on. The characters are real; the only thing that is unreal is what happens to the characters. Thus, this book is a perfect example for me, as that describes exactly the kind of stories I want to write. I don't want to write stories that use weirdness to be clever: I want the weirdness to fit with my characters. I want it to be necessary, and that is the case with the best weird stories in this book.
The second reason I loved this book is because it is very dark. The darkest moment of the book was in the last story, when the narrator says, "Do not fight for custody of your children. Better they see you one weekend a month than in a casket" (Kindle 2549). Maybe that line doesn't sound like much here, but within the context of the story, it works. It's very dark, and I don't think that it's the kind of darkness that can be learned. It seems like the kind of darkness that has to fester inside an author for a long time. I hope not, but that darkness seems very real. Much darker than anything I can write or than anything I can feel, so it's nice to get from somewhere else. There's something about that kind of darkness that pulls me to it.
And finally, something very surprising about the book: I actually liked the last story. "An Index of How Our Family Was Killed" is a story written as a list. I normally hate those kind of cheesy stories. We writers love trying stuff like that, and it's usually obnoxious. I dreaded reading it and almost thought about skipping it. It works, though, and is a great story. As I've suggested, it's the darkest part of the book; it expresses its character's heart as well as any other story in the collection.
The second reason I loved this book is because it is very dark. The darkest moment of the book was in the last story, when the narrator says, "Do not fight for custody of your children. Better they see you one weekend a month than in a casket" (Kindle 2549). Maybe that line doesn't sound like much here, but within the context of the story, it works. It's very dark, and I don't think that it's the kind of darkness that can be learned. It seems like the kind of darkness that has to fester inside an author for a long time. I hope not, but that darkness seems very real. Much darker than anything I can write or than anything I can feel, so it's nice to get from somewhere else. There's something about that kind of darkness that pulls me to it.
And finally, something very surprising about the book: I actually liked the last story. "An Index of How Our Family Was Killed" is a story written as a list. I normally hate those kind of cheesy stories. We writers love trying stuff like that, and it's usually obnoxious. I dreaded reading it and almost thought about skipping it. It works, though, and is a great story. As I've suggested, it's the darkest part of the book; it expresses its character's heart as well as any other story in the collection.
April 2, 2015
3.5 stars really, but inclined to add rather than subtract from this book because I recognise that there is some terrific writing here, and some good examples of the kind of story I don’t really care for, eg the re-telling of fairy tales in a postmodern way (here, Red Riding Hood: The girl was surprised when she slid her hand between the wolf’s muscular, furred legs, to find that he was a she..), or the too-weird (a woman finds her just left boyfriend replaced by a miniature version of him). I loved the stories, still weird, but just this side of plausible – a man retrieves a body from the lake (The drowned girl drips everywhere, soaking the cheap cloth of the Ford’s back seat), and keeps her in the freezer. The story is tense, the writing taut and evocative. Or the brothers that live in a mansion filled with newspapers and detritus and machines and objects, so much that they can only get about through tunnels. Or the story implied by an Index of terms (Police, as in, I have had my fill of police). Although in both these latter two stories plausibility is stretched to its absolute limits, and maybe beyond. So gripped and bored alternately in different stories. But recommended.
An example of the writing I really liked: The sound of a bullet making wet music in his organs.
An example of the writing I really liked: The sound of a bullet making wet music in his organs.
February 4, 2011
Read "Cartographer's Girl," the first story in Matt Bell's powerful debut collection, HOW THEY WERE FOUND, and I challenge you to stop reading. This modern day fairy tale moved me deeply, and sets the extraordinary tone for these fresh, inventive and deeply affecting stories.
From "Cartographer's Girl":
"The compasses are disappointingly true, pointing north over and over, when all he wants is for one to dissent, to demur, to show him the new direction he cannot find on his own."
"... and then she'd cling to his body like the mast of a sinking ship, like she had lashed herself to him."
"Wolf Parts" is another similar standout. That and "Dredge" chilled me to my core.
From "The Leftover":
"She will say, I am still here. She will say it like it means something all by itself, like quitting or being quit on is the easiest thing in the world."
Even stories where I felt less riveted, less connected, like "A Certain Number of Bedrooms, A Certain Number of Baths," still offered so much by ways of language and craft.
I think Matt Bell poured his heart into these stories, called into action every bit of brilliance at his proposal, and the result is great and gorgeous on so many levels.
Thank you, Matt.
From "Cartographer's Girl":
"The compasses are disappointingly true, pointing north over and over, when all he wants is for one to dissent, to demur, to show him the new direction he cannot find on his own."
"... and then she'd cling to his body like the mast of a sinking ship, like she had lashed herself to him."
"Wolf Parts" is another similar standout. That and "Dredge" chilled me to my core.
From "The Leftover":
"She will say, I am still here. She will say it like it means something all by itself, like quitting or being quit on is the easiest thing in the world."
Even stories where I felt less riveted, less connected, like "A Certain Number of Bedrooms, A Certain Number of Baths," still offered so much by ways of language and craft.
I think Matt Bell poured his heart into these stories, called into action every bit of brilliance at his proposal, and the result is great and gorgeous on so many levels.
Thank you, Matt.
March 16, 2016
First off, I want to say I was familiar with Matt's work coming in, having hooked up on the social sites (we writers be pimpin' yo!) and downloading a free sample of his short story The Collectors which was probably the best short story I've read in aa while- then came these stories.
Not every story in the collection caught my emotion. The apocalyptic story about the dimmed older soldiers at the receiving tower was written with pin point precision and I could feel how cold it was by the descriptions of ice and a stack of dead bodies by the tower (that detail in itself says a lot about the coldness- no dead flesh smell) it was gloomy but I didn't feel or I should say relate to the characters and their situation. They were empty and emotionless from spending their youth to middle age by this tower and because they were flat that's how I felt about the story.
My favorites were The Cartographers Girl and This is How My Family Died, two poignant pieces about love and loss but different kinds, the magnitude of the losses separated by whom was lost, a whole family, a lover, yet the suffering in each just as heavy, which is how Matt treats this whole book, not shying away from intense emotion and treating each character's suffering with an equally deft brush stroke. Get. This. Book.
Not every story in the collection caught my emotion. The apocalyptic story about the dimmed older soldiers at the receiving tower was written with pin point precision and I could feel how cold it was by the descriptions of ice and a stack of dead bodies by the tower (that detail in itself says a lot about the coldness- no dead flesh smell) it was gloomy but I didn't feel or I should say relate to the characters and their situation. They were empty and emotionless from spending their youth to middle age by this tower and because they were flat that's how I felt about the story.
My favorites were The Cartographers Girl and This is How My Family Died, two poignant pieces about love and loss but different kinds, the magnitude of the losses separated by whom was lost, a whole family, a lover, yet the suffering in each just as heavy, which is how Matt treats this whole book, not shying away from intense emotion and treating each character's suffering with an equally deft brush stroke. Get. This. Book.
May 6, 2013
Matt Bell, you brilliant bastard. If he's not already your favorite new writer, you might want to fix that. The genre-defying author of Cataclysm Baby has done the world a favor by combining all of his best, previously published short stories into a single collection. Not a complaint can be said about the whole bunch. Every story bleeds originality and leaves an indelible mark on the reader that borders between child-like wonder and green-eyed jealousy. For me, Bell's prose is simply inspiring. This collection demands to be read. Stop reading this review, whip out your checkbook and give Mr. Bell whatever he needs to continue pumping out solid gold. Seriously.
For those looking for a table of contents:
The Cartographer's Girl
The Receiving Tower
His Last Great Gift
Her Ennead
Hold On To Your Vacuum
Dredge
Ten Scenes from a Movie Called Mercy
Wolf Parts
Mantodea
The Leftover
A Certain Number of Bedrooms, A Certain Number of Baths
The Collectors
An Index of How Our Family Was Killed
For those looking for a table of contents:
The Cartographer's Girl
The Receiving Tower
His Last Great Gift
Her Ennead
Hold On To Your Vacuum
Dredge
Ten Scenes from a Movie Called Mercy
Wolf Parts
Mantodea
The Leftover
A Certain Number of Bedrooms, A Certain Number of Baths
The Collectors
An Index of How Our Family Was Killed
April 5, 2014
This story collection is the unflinching work of a young master with an incredible imagination and an excellent, often rhythmical prose style. Reading most of his stories is painful, but it is a pain that is earned, that is experienced in the form and language of each piece. The violence in these stories is both kept at arm’s length through the stories’ formal structures and heightened and experienced in a fresh way.
Bell’s stories (these are my first encounter with Bell’s writing) bear a resemblance to Peter Dimock’s work, in Bell’s penchant for formal approaches to tragic circumstances, and in the intricate, imaginative, and uncompromising way he looks at family relationships and the effects on children of what parents do.
Bell’s uncompromising approach breaks down the reader and buoys him up (with the brilliance of the writing). I can't wait to read more of his work.
Bell’s stories (these are my first encounter with Bell’s writing) bear a resemblance to Peter Dimock’s work, in Bell’s penchant for formal approaches to tragic circumstances, and in the intricate, imaginative, and uncompromising way he looks at family relationships and the effects on children of what parents do.
Bell’s uncompromising approach breaks down the reader and buoys him up (with the brilliance of the writing). I can't wait to read more of his work.
September 10, 2014
A solid of first collection of stories, ranging in influences from science fiction to true crime to historical fiction. The last two stories were among the best: "The Collectors"--a re-telling of the end days of the Collyer brothers, hoarders extrordinaire, crushed by their self-made nightmare; and "An Index of How Our Family Was Killed," which tells about just that, in the form of an index--a constraint nicely tackled. While the voices vary from story to story, the overarching theme is inescapable desolation. Oddly enough, though, the narrative voice is more capacious and nuanced--a contrast I'll chalk up to a young writer's journeyman work, exploring the extremes to find his true voice and theme, which I imagine will shake out to be a world a little fantastic and vividly imagined, but rueful and melancholy, not horrific
October 12, 2010
Bell brings us everything: symbolism, futurism à la David Ohle, devastation, surrealism, scenic energy, fractured fairytales, consumption, struggle, claustrophobia, and family decay. But this is not to say How They Were Found spreads itself too thin or is too chaotically varied; Bell knows how to keep his world in check, his every word balanced against another, delicately, like a system of weights...[read the full review at The Rumpus: http://therumpus.net/2010/10/how-they... ]
July 15, 2014
I admire Bell's fearless approach in this collection. Some of the stories worked better than others. Some were downright touching, and many were genuinely creepy. There is also humor buried within the human decay, rendering the reader's state conflicted, not unlike the stories' characters. If you like short stories that bite off big ideas, this collection is a must-read.
November 9, 2010
Won this book from First Reads! There are times when I enjoy reading short stories. This is one good book. I felt like I had completed a book after each story. Even one that was an award winning story.
Want to read
September 6, 2010Looking forward to this one, for sure.
January 3, 2011
Fantastic dark/horror/weird collection of short fiction.
February 27, 2011
Visceral, scalpel sharp placing of words to create people on the edge. Wolf Parts, The Collectors (previously in chapbooks), Dredge, and Her Ennead were particular faves.
August 9, 2018
Well, every story was different. Bell experiments wildly with form, and he's certainly good with ideas.
I just didn't like many of the stories. The collection started out fairly strong ('Cartographer's Girl,' 'The Receiving Tower') and then lagged in the middle, and then ended up okay ('The Collectors' and 'An Index...').
The middle was just kind of gross. (Can writers please please please stop rewriting fairy tales? I can't even begin to list how many iterations I've read of various Grimm tales and I'm deeply sick of it.)
There's a good amount of talent here, but I wish I hadn't read half the stories.
I just didn't like many of the stories. The collection started out fairly strong ('Cartographer's Girl,' 'The Receiving Tower') and then lagged in the middle, and then ended up okay ('The Collectors' and 'An Index...').
The middle was just kind of gross. (Can writers please please please stop rewriting fairy tales? I can't even begin to list how many iterations I've read of various Grimm tales and I'm deeply sick of it.)
There's a good amount of talent here, but I wish I hadn't read half the stories.
July 16, 2025
I've had this collection on my Kindle for a long time and finally got around to reading it. Some very good stories along with some that failed to resonate with me for whatever reason. I appreciated the mix of story lengths. Overall, the stories were darker than I expected - I had no reason to think they wouldn't be, it just surprised me. Some are a little gross, but I can be a little squeamish. Overall, a solid collection and a quick read.
January 25, 2023
Each story is a dark strange wonder of world building, Bell’s creative premises and alluring prose are the stars. That said, if you want your mysteries solved and your plots tidily resolved, many of these stories may leave you wanting more.
April 11, 2022
Inventive stories well told. Many unusual characters and circumstances. Liked The Collectors best.
August 18, 2024
Collection of short stories, some good, some not so much. Get you thinking, though.
August 26, 2021
Really strange short stories. This book is an experience.
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