The Collectors, by Matt Bell. May 2009

5 3/8" × 8 5/16" × 64 pp.

$8.00 US Out of print; Now a Free PDF EBook

EXPLORE THIS BOOK WITH ISSUU VIEWER OR Download the PDF

“‘Even a book can be a door,’ suggests the narrator of Matt Bell’s The Collectors. What you’ll find behind this particular door are two shaken and shaky brothers losing their tenuous grip on reality, slowly filling their house with decades of booby-trapped detritus and precious trash. The Collectors is a compelling portrait both of the way a heated mind can come to recreate the world and of how fascination with such a mind can end up being its own sort of trap. A wonderful, obsessive novella.”

Brian Evenson, author of The Open Curtain and Last Days

“Matt Bell makes of the pathology of the miser, hoarder, or packrat an emblem of the obsessive life and makes his reader understand how the compulsion to collect may be only the mind’s seeking to construct for itself a refuge from an intolerable and otherwise inescapable reality. Bell’s fiction excites pity for those who live, as though walled up, in ruins of their own necessary construction. I admire The Collectors for the certainty of its prose and its unflinching observation of a most profound alienation—envying the first; fearing the second; and unhappily aware that artifice—no matter how splendid—is inadequate to ameliorate the despair.”

Norman Lock, author of A History of the Imagination

“Matt Bell’s lifesick pair, Langley and Homer, shell-shocked under a pile of newspapers, are disquieting, hilarious, and—in that strange way that makes Beckett’s and Kafka’s characters so urgent—entirely recognizable. Bell has written a beauty.”

Deb Olin Unferth, author of Vacation

Matt Bell’s The Collectors was chosen by Brian Evenson as the runner-up manuscript in the 2008 Caketrain Chapbook Competition. The tale of compulsive hoarders Homer and Langley Collyer so shocked 1940s Manhattan that the brothers and their Harlem brownstone live on today as one of the most notable American case studies of acute disposophobia. With a nervous energy and obsession to match his protagonists, Bell’s prose burrows, forensically, into the layers of the brothers’ lives, employing a multilinear narrative structure and a frenetic plurality of perspectives to reach a core of despair that is both terrifyingly primal and distressingly familiar.

Acknowledgments
The chapters “William Baker” and “Artie Matthews” were published in Wigleaf as “How They Were Found and Who They Were That Found Them” (2008). Text Copyright 2009 Matt Bell. Cover image texture courtesy of Brandie Jenkins. “Table of Pneumaticks” from Cyclopaedia, or Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, Volume 2, 1728.