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? 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
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