Scrapper

by Matt Bell

Overview

For fans of The Dog Stars and Station Eleven, Scrapper traces one man’s desperate quest for redemption in a devastated Detroit.

"Has the feel of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road set in present-day Motor City... powerful."
—Publishers Weekly

Detroit has descended into ruin. Kelly scavenges for scrap metal from the hundred thousand abandoned buildings in a part of the city known as “the zone,” an increasingly wild landscape where one day he finds something far more valuable than the copper he’s come to steal: a kidnapped boy, crying out for rescue. Briefly celebrated as a hero, Kelly secretly avenges the boy’s unsolved kidnapping, a task that will take him deeper into the zone and into a confrontation with his own past and long-buried traumas.

The second novel from the acclaimed author of In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, Scrapper is a devastating reimagining of one of America’s greatest cities, its beautiful architecture, its lost houses, shuttered factories, boxing gyms, and storefront churches. With precise, powerful prose, it asks: What do we owe for our crimes, even those we’ve committed to protect the people we love?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781616955229
Publisher:	Soho Press, Incorporated
Publication date:	09/15/2015
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	195,556
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Matt Bell is the author of the novel In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award, a Michigan Notable Book, and an Indies Choice Adult Debut Book of the Year Honor Recipient, as well as the winner of the Paula Anderson Book Award. His stories have appeared in Best American Mystery Stories, Conjunctions, Gulf Coast, The American Reader, and many other publications. Born in Michigan, he now teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.

Read an Excerpt

1

When Kelly saved the boy he was not yet again living any real life, just wallowing in the aftermath of terrible error. Later he would say he’d lived that year by his hands and by his back and by his shoulders and his wrists and his legs and his knees. The year of the body, he’d say, showing his opened fists, the thick white blistering of his calluses—and forget the head, never mind the heart. After the collapse began he’d barely thought, barely spoken, tried for a time to slow his thoughts to silence, or else to bury them with effort, exhaustion. He’d worked past the pains he’d known, found deeper places to lodge a throbbing, but then in the zone the incompleteness of every building became an inkblot for the subconscious. Whatever was missing would be supplied.
     The farther he moved toward the center of the zone the more the neighborhoods sagged, all the wood falling off of brick, most every house uninhabited, the stores a couple thousand square feet of blank shelves, windows barred against the stealing of the nothing there. Paint scraped off concrete, concrete crumbled, turned to dust beneath the weather. Wind damage, water damage. Fire and flood. Before the zone Kelly had never known rain alone could turn a building to dust. But rain had flooded the Great Lakes, ice had sheered the cliffs of the state from off the land, shaped the dunes he’d dreamed of often after he’d left the state. The streets here were empty of traffic and in some neighborhoods the grass overran the sidewalks. He parked his truck, got out, walked the paved lanes instead. On trash days he could tell whether a house was occupied by whether or not a container appeared at the curb. There were other methods of determining inhabitation: the sound of televisions or radios, the presence of cut grass. But some men cut the grass for their neighbors to hide how they were the last ones living on their block. A way of pretending normality, despite the boarded windows, the graffiti, the other front doors never opened. Despite the absolute absence of other cars, other human voices.
    Mostly it was easier. Mostly there was no question where there were people left behind. The only questions he had to ask were about opportunity, risk, metal.
    Whenever Kelly entered an uninhabited house he understood he entered some life he might have lived, how the emptiness of every room pulled him inside out. A furnishing of the self. He opened the front door and the house ceased its stillness. If it had ever been inert it wasn’t now. No structure was once it held a human consciousness. In the South Kelly had worked construction, had seen firsthand how a house unlived in wasn’t a house. It was so easy to awaken a place. The way a doorknob awoke a memory. The way the angles of a room recalled other rooms. There were blueprints etched across his memories, and in some houses those memories activated: the bedrooms of his parents, the bedrooms of his parents’ friends. An angle of light like one he’d lain in as a child, reading a book on birds. The deep dark of a basement, the other dark of an attic. How the fear of the dark hung at the lip of a basement stairs, how it hesitated at the foot of any stairs leading up, toward whatever was below or above the house, outside its public space.


With his smartphone he could check the prices of what he salvaged: the amounts offered changed day to day but he couldn’t wait days to sell what he’d dug. At the salvage yards the workers weighed the truck loaded and then they weighed the truck empty, paid him a price multiplied against the difference. The salvage men photocopied his ID, took an inky thumbprint. This was a legitimate business, they said. They asked where he’d gotten the scrap and he lied. They asked again and he took a lower price per pound.
    Whatever the salvage yards wouldn’t take he took to other men, brokers running scrap out of a backyard or an idle warehouse. There was no trouble with space. There was space everywhere. The unofficial yards kept unofficial hours. You could show up in the middle of the day and find the place deserted, show up at midnight and find three guys playing cards, getting high, cutting scrap. They paid a fraction of the price, the price of no questions asked. Whatever was suspect they’d break until it was sellable. There were scrapyards where no one asked these brokers questions, contractors who would mix the questionable stuff with more honest trade.
    Once he’d arrived to find a man cutting a copper statue with a power saw. The man shirtless, skin gleaming, working without eye protection, a stub of a cigarette clamped in his mouth. The statue’s arms sawed at the elbows. The head on the ground. The saw working its way through the torso at a steep diagonal. The kerf of the cut wide like a wound from a sword. Then the smashing the hands with a sledge. Then the mutilating the head into unrecognizable shards.
    Broker: a ridiculous word for such a man but everyone selfjustified. Everyone wanted to be more than what they were.
    The salvage men reminded him: it wasn’t the function they sold but the form. It didn’t matter if he broke a broken refrigerator. What mattered was getting it to the truck without straining his back. There was more steel and iron than anything else but they paid the least of anything. A hundred pounds of copper pipe paid more than double a truckload of steel. Same for copper wire, copper cable. You could ransack the rooms of a house but the best stuff was hidden behind the walls. It wasn’t the metal that held the house up but you wouldn’t want to live there with it gone.
    Kelly could picture the city’s glory days but it took a certain imagination. On the television in his barely furnished apartment he watched a blonde reporter say the collapse was still in progress but now it was down to the aftershocks. Sometimes the news interviewed one of the left behind. Once this man or woman had been an autoworker or a grocery clerk like anyone else. What mysteries they were now, the blonde reporter said, these unemployed men and women with their forlorn streets, their locked doors nested behind locked doors.
    Why didn’t they leave, if things were so bad.
    Why didn’t we understand why, if we had homes of our own.

Editorial Reviews

Equal parts dystopian novel, psychological thriller and literary fiction, the book evokes a dark and lonely existence for its stoic protagonist. Similar to Bell's fabulist debut, In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods, the narrative excavates the edges of what it means to be haunted. In Scrapper, Bell's strengths shine through on the sentence level, the grim and the poetic side by side.

The New York Times Book Review - S. Kirk Walsh

07/27/2015
Bell’s (In the House upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods) succinctly titled and relentlessly grim second novel has the feel of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road set in present-day Motor City. Kelly is a psychologically scarred loner who feels himself to be two different men: “the scrapper,” a righteously violent being, and “the salvor,” someone who can fix the damage he finds everywhere around him. While scavenging for scrap metal in a blighted area of Detroit called the zone, he discovers a naked boy chained to a bed in the basement of an abandoned house. After freeing the boy, Kelly becomes obsessed with exacting vengeance on the shadowy perpetrator. Throughout, Bell has a tendency to overload the narrative with pain and gloom. Kelly “believe only in the grimness of the world, the great loneliness of the vacuum without end,” and his lover, an emergency dispatcher suffering from a degenerative condition, spends her days listening to “cries of human misery.” Periodic interludes about forced feeding in Guantanamo Bay, George Zimmerman, and Pripyat (an abandoned city next to Chernobyl) add unnecessary weight to an already weighty story. At its solid foundation, however, the novel is a morality tale about the duty to confront the evil in the world and within oneself, a tale told in powerful, controlled prose. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Scrapper

"Equal parts dystopian novel, psychological thriller, and literary fiction, [Scrapper] evokes a dark and lonely existence for its stoic protagonist . . . By the novel's end, Bell adeptly depicts Kelly as a complicated soul capable of great violence and kindness."
—The New York Times Book Review

"A fearless and harrowing meditation on the ruination and transformation of cities and of people; but amid loss and destruction, Bell finds a strain of piercing hope. This is an extraordinary book."
—Emily St. John Mandel, New York Times bestselling author of Station Eleven

"This haunting story is juxtaposed with Bell’s fierce lyricism, creating a stirring and noir-ish novel that reflects on the nature of emptiness, ruin and renewal."
—The Detroit Free Press

"Scrapper is a meditative, moody work of art. It's about love and violence, hope and ruin, a kind of superhero story for adults. Matt Bell is truly gifted and his latest offers more proof that he's a writer we should all be reading."
—Victor LaValle, author of The Devil in Silver

"I love this book . . . full of metaphorical possibilities . . . quite frankly beautiful. Does to Detroit what Bolaño does to Ciudad Juárez . . . Fantastic."
—KTEP, Words on a Wire

"A book of what to do with ruin and of how we attempt to salvage or redeem . . . Scrapper eventually shows Kelly to be a deeply wounded man, so much so that he nearly carries two halves inside him: the 'scrapper' and the 'salvor.' The former wants to rip the houses apart and let Detroit (and himself) burn; the latter wants to find and treasure whatever may yet be worth saving—in himself, in Detroit, in anyone."
—Star Tribune

"Bell’s fiction has been described as grisly, spooky, and dreamlike. Perhaps parts of Scrapper are each of those things, as it takes us on a journey through trauma, destruction, and hope—hope for ourselves, for others, for those who would make us afraid."
—The Rumpus

"[Scrapper] explores regret, redemption, and the cost of violence in both our private lives and on the global scale of racism, war, and industry."
—Belt Magazine

"Bell slowly teases [out] Kelly’s failures at willed amnesia in equally beautiful and painful streaks of poetic and suggestive prose . . . Stunning, timely, and ultimately illuminating."
—Rain Taxi Review of Books

"An apocalypse of the psyche."
—American Book Review

"Scrapper explores the apocalypse of the everyday, the world-ending moments that happen in silence and how against all odds we try to survive them and be better."
—Puerto del Sol

"Splendid . . . stirring . . . Bell is a brave writer . . . [and] can write like a dream."
—Bill Morris, author of Motor City Burning, for The Millions

"Matt Bell’s new novel Scrapper envisions a world as grim and primed for post mortem as any sci-fi dystopia . . . One of the most unflinchingly real and devastatingly disconcerting narratives of a hero’s acclaim imaginable . . . A punishingly effective and brutally affecting novel."
—PASTE

"[Bell is] a literary chameleon who refuses to be cast in a single mold . . . Scrapper is as much a love letter to the Detroit of old as it is a literary thriller." 
 —LitReactor

"Matt Bell describes his new novel, Scrapper, as a 'quiet book'—but it comes across with the noisy fury of righteous revenge . . . The author could’ve easily settled for a straightforward novel about the hard and dangerous life of a scrapper, but the novel takes a decidedly darker turn . . . At its core, the book is a love story intertwined with a morality tale and a reflection on how we find redemption through confronting evil."
—Lansing City Pulse

"I’ve been reading and admiring Matt Bell‘s constantly shifting, deeply visceral fiction for years now . . . Scrapper, retains [the] sense of grit and emotional tension [of In The House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods], but does so in a much more realistic setting: specifically, contemporary Detroit."
—Tobias Carroll, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

"[Bell] has done us all a service by writing this book and imagining this world in such richness and depth."
—Brad Listi, Other People Podcast

"Scrapper [is] a meditation on the ruins of a city and an entire American landscape of fear, and on breaking a cycle of perpetuated, inherited violence."
—The Pleiades Book Review

"Original and honest, you won’t want to put this one down." 
—BookTrib

"[A] melancholy ode to Motor City . . . [Scrapper] explores what it means to be a man, but it also works with diligence to eviscerate this medieval notion, to shine a light into the hollow posturing, the macho bluster, and the animalistic violence."
—The New York Journal of Books

"A tale of hard emotions in a hard environment . . . Bell poses difficult, elemental questions about right and wrong and of what constitutes morality in a place where the usual rules don’t always apply. And, refreshingly, the answers his protagonist arrives at are neither easy nor expected."
—Library Journal, Starred Review

"Scrapper proves particularly grim, a novel set in a wasteland version of Detroit . . . All the same, Kelly, the protagonist, finds 'the endurance of the beautiful,' . . . resulting in an existential noir that seems to merge Robbe-Grillet with the film Prisoners."
—Kirkus Reviews

"Scrapper is rooted in the tragic reality of a once-great city’s collapse, but Bell seems to be revisiting some of [In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods's] fundamental concerns: obligations to loved ones, redemption from past misdeeds . . . Bell’s portrait of a city brought to its knees is riveting."
—Booklist

"Has the feel of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road set in present-day Motor City . . . A morality tale about the duty to confront the evil in the world and within oneself, a tale told in powerful, controlled prose."
—Publishers Weekly

"Scrapper is an offering to the grim phoenix rising out of the ashes of Industrial America—elegy, eulogy, and prophesy. Readers: listen and attend!"
—Aaron Gwyn, author of Wynne's War and Dog on the Cross

"Matt Bell adds his song to the poetry inherent in the image of the abandoned city. Here, in his fierce second novel, Scrapper, Bell mines Detroit, the zone, with Kelly, an unforgettably rendered ruin, an 'unaccomodated man . . . a poor, bare, forked animal,' who yet amazes with his capacity to love. " 
—Christine Schutt, author of Prosperous Friends

"In the imaginative, mysterious, and beautiful Scrapper, Matt Bell delves into the complexity of ruins: the wider American ruins and the local personal ruins. This is an evocative novel that lingers over what has been abandoned and shows us how the places we inhabit shape who we are and how we are."
—Dana Spiotta, author of Stone Arabia

"Like the very best novels, Matt Bell's dark and suspenseful Scrapper works on so many levels that it's difficult to describe in just a few words, but what I can tell you is that it's ultimately about love and death, and that people will still be reading it when all of America, not just Detroit, is crumbling under the weight of its mistakes." 
—Donald Ray Pollock, author of The Devil All the Time

Praise for In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods

“Mr. Bell has written a gripping, grisly tale of a husband’s descent into and ultimate emergence from some kind of personal hell.”
—The New York Times

“It's hard to imagine a book more difficult to pull off, but Bell proves as self-assured as he is audacious . . . Bell's novel isn't just a joy to read, it's also one of the smartest meditations on the subjects of love, family and marriage in recent years . . . The novel is a monument to the uniqueness of every relationship, the possibility that love itself can make the world better, though of course it's never easy.”
—NPR

"Somber, incantatory sentences to hold you within [Bell's] dreamlike creation . . . This unique book leaves you with the haunting lesson that even if you renounce and cast away your loved ones, you can never disown the memory of your deeds."
—The Wall Street Journal

"A blood-soaked fable . . . With this debut novel, Matt Bell [reworks] myths, rituals and fictions into something that can hold his visceral, primal vision. In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods provides us with a new, unstable literary element, something scavenged from the old, something bright and wet and vital.”
—The Globe and Mail

“For readers weary of literary fiction that dutifully obeys the laws of nature, here’s a story that stirs the Brothers Grimm and Salvador Dalí with its claws . . . As gorgeous as it is devastating.”
—The Washington Post

“In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods is an extraordinary achievement, telling a most ancient story in a way that feels uncannily new."
—The Boston Globe

"This is a fiercely original book—at once intimate and epic, visceral and philosophical—that sent me scurrying for adjectives, for precedents, for cover. Matt Bell commands the page with bold, vigorous prose and may well have invented the pulse-pounding novel of ideas."
—Jess Walter, National Book Award Finalist and author of Beautiful Ruins and We Live in Water

From the Publisher

★ 09/01/2015
Set in "the zone"—the abandoned urban neighborhoods of Detroit—this is a tale of hard emotions in a hard environment. At the center of the novel is Kelly, an emotionally distant man in has thirties who has shut down as a result of past traumas. He makes a living by scavenging scrap metal from abandoned buildings, which is something of a metaphor for his life. Things begin to change when he sparks a relationship with a woman as physically damaged as he is emotionally. Then, one day while scavenging, he discovers a kidnapped boy locked in the basement of an abandoned house. Following the rescue, for which he's proclaimed a hero, he starts to see himself as the protector of the boy and sets out to avenge his kidnapping. Along the way, he discovers that someone close to the child is hurting him and comes face to face with his own past and the conventional expectations of society as he strives to protect someone he loves. VERDICT Bell poses difficult, elemental questions about right and wrong and of what constitutes morality in a place where the usual rules don't always apply. And, refreshingly, the answers his protagonist arrives at are neither easy nor expected. [See Prepub Alert, 6/21/15.]—Lawrence Rungren, Andover, MA

Library Journal