Scrapper

By Matt Bell

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?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Sep 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9781616955229

Matt Bell

Matt Bell is the author of the novels Scrapper and In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, as well as the short story collection A Tree or a Person or a Wall, a non-fiction book about the classic video game Baldur's Gate II, and several other titles. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Tin House, Conjunctions, Fairy Tale Review, American Short Fiction, and many other publications. A native of Michigan, he teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.

Reviews for Scrapper

[chrisblocker · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The premise of Matt Bell's latest novel, Scrapper, is fantastic. This psychological tale of post-fall Detroit centers around a scavenger who guts homes and businesses for scrap metal. In the book's opening chapters, the scavenger, Kelly, finds a boy who has been kidnapped. The rest of the novel focuses largely on Kelly's turmoil regarding his own tragic past and the trauma of the kidnapped boy.What works extraordinarily well in this novel is the casting of Detroit as a character. Bell paints the city in such a manner that I found myself repeatedly looking up information about Detroit to better understand this city. He handles the city with affection and trepidation. I was scared of Detroit, but I understood why it was to be feared—it had been abused, abandoned, and forgotten. It's Bell's treatment of the setting that makes this city alive.And yet, while the setting is so detailed, the time was never quite clear to me. Initially, I thought I was reading a story set twenty or thirty years in the future, but the more I read, the less sure I was about when I was. It's okay. Time isn't necessary to enjoy this novel, and perhaps it's better not to know; but I did find myself wondering to the point of distraction.Scrapper has a wonderful set-up and is certainly written well. As the book proceeds, it does become largely psychological and I think it could've done with more solid story telling to back up what was going on in the mind of Kelly. Nevertheless, I was greatly impressed with Bell's writing and I look forward to reading more of his work in the future.