A Tree or a Person or a Wall by Matt Bell (review)

Matt Bell’s collection of short stories, A Tree or a Person or a Wall, opens with the story about a boy who has been abducted by “a man with rough hands” and locked in a room with an albino monkey. While this scenario is terrifying, it is infinitely more terrifying in Bell’s words. He opens the book with, “Even before the man with rough hands brought the boy to the locked, room, even then there was always already the albino ape sitting on the chair beside the nightstand, waiting for the man and the boy to come.”

How does he do this? Is it the simple use of the word “even?” Is it the repetition of the word “even?” Is it the alliteration in “always already the albino ape” in which one can hear the sound “aaa,” reminiscent of the sounds we make when we are in despair? In fact, the same “a” sound that’s in the word “despair?” Is it the endlessness of the scene that he portrays with “always already?” The monkey’s endless waiting he recreates for the reader with the endless-feeling sentence?

This sentence is the reason we read Matt Bell. You open a Matt Bell book, you read the first sentence, you fall in love, and we know that in his capable hands we’ll go anywhere, even In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods, where he convinces us to go with, “Before Our First Encounter With [sic] the bear I had already finished building the house, or nearly so.” He convinces us to go to Detroit, with a Scrapper, “When Kelly saved the boy he was not yet again living any real life, just wallowing in the aftermath of terrible error.”

He can even convince us to go nowhere, which is where the title story in the collection goes. We enter the locked room, and we never come out, not in the story, not even after we finish reading the story. He doesn’t release us. We will never forget this story and thus, in some ways, we are never able to leave the room. His story does not move ahead, only deeper and darker. Thus everything we will ever “know,” we know in the first sentence. The rest of the story is not interested in us knowing more. In fact, it is interested in us knowing less. Its intent is to make us feel the terror of not knowing anything, not even things that happened in the past, and every attempt at knowing more leads us further and further away from such relief. In this way, we can authentically empathize with the terror of the boy.

What happens, or doesn’t happen, is irrelevant in any of the stories in this book. In fact, we know everything that happens already. For example, “Wolf Parts” is about Little Red Riding Hood, whose story we know through and through. We know she gets eaten by a wolf; we know she was on her way to visit her grandmother; we know she escapes the wolf ’s inside. We know she wears a red riding hood; we know she has a basket of goodies; we know she picks flowers. We know everything about Red there is to know. There’s nothing more to know. What’s left, again, is the unknowable. To face how much we don’t know about what (or whom) we believe to know so well.

Matt Bell can make the most mundane and familiar—events that we do not associate with horror—terrifying. For example, “Her Ennead” is about a pregnancy. Nothing happens in this story. The baby is fine, the mother is fine, and everything is going along just fine, as it should be. The baby is born—perfectly healthy. Nothing happens that shouldn’t have happened. And yet, and yet. We feel the mother’s terror: terror for herself, for her own life, for the life of the fetus...