Matt Bell’s A Tree or a Person or a Wall might be categorized as Existentialist Horror. If human beings are the architects of our own fate, then Bell’s stories suggest we’ve pretty much made a hash of it.
As a warning to fans of Stephen King or Edgar Allen Poe or even Shirley Jackson, you won’t find anything that straightforward within these pages. These are literary allegories chock full of evocative and disturbing imagery with plots that are often vague or surrealistic. Most seem to deal with the repercussions of human folly, like bigotry (“The Migration”), over-reliance on technology and conformity (“For You We Are Holding”) or the pursuit of eternal youth (“The Inheritance”). The title piece, “A Tree or a Person or a Wall,” is about a young boy who spends his life imprisoned in a cell with an albino ape until such time as he will become the jailer and imprison another small boy, perhaps illustrating the vicious cycle of complacency that perpetuates evil.
The longest story “Cataclysm Baby,” is a literal A-to-Z of freakish children born into an ever more desecrated world; each baby represents some aspect of the moral degradation of mankind and the ways in which we’ve exploited [and will ultimately destroy] our world. This seems to be a popular theme with Bell as there are a number of straight-out dystopian and/or apocalyptic tales. In “The Receiving Tower” a small platoon of elderly men, seemingly the last on Earth, have spent countless years in some sort of military installation awaiting word from the outside world that their commission has finally been served and they will be allowed to leave. In “The Collectors,” we get a glimpse into the final days of the real-life Collyer brothers, New York socialites turned hoarders who died as a result of being trapped amongst the debris and filth they’d accumulated in their Fifth Avenue mansion. Sort of a microcosm of mankind’s relationship to the planet and, taken in the context of the rest of the collection, certainly some sort of cautionary tale.
Bell has a great command of mood and his language is very haunting. The stories have a way of sticking with you and making you think. This is a brilliant collection. I can recommend it not only to high-minded horror fans, but anyone who’s interested in well-written, modern morality fables.
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