Scrapper

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[s] 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.)