Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods | 2013 | Matt Bell | Buy |
| 2 | Scrapper | 2015 | Matt Bell | Buy |
| 3 | Appleseed | 2021 | Matt Bell | Buy |
Matt Bell’s standalone novels span nearly a decade of increasingly ambitious literary fiction. In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods (2013) reads like a fever-dream fable: a couple builds a life in an unnamed wilderness, and the story folds in on itself through cycles of creation and destruction. It was a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award.
Scrapper (2015) shifts to contemporary Detroit, where a man scrapping abandoned houses discovers a kidnapped boy in a basement. The novel maps the physical and moral terrain of a shrinking American city. Appleseed (2021) is Bell’s most expansive work, braiding three storylines across centuries: an 18th-century frontiersman planting orchards, a near-future corporate dystopia, and a far-future post-human landscape. It was named a New York Times Notable Book.