SCRAPPER, BY MATT BELL
In Scrapper, Matt Bell asks readers to take a long, hard at look at our destructive capabilities as humans—our ability to dismantle civilizations, cities, our fellow man, our own flesh. Bell sets much of his story in Detroit, presented as a wasteland from some dystopian future, yet redolent with contemporary resonances. Kelly, the Scrapper, is torn between the man he could be and the man he probably is, constantly fighting each version of himself, past and future.
By invoking George Zimmerman, Guantánamo and Chernobyl, Bell signals his interest in depicting not only the crumbling of a once-major American metropolis, but the crumbling of our larger humanity—not in some dystopian future, but in the present. From Scrapper we get the unsettling, pervasive feeling “that in darkness…anything might happen next, that this was the beginning of something new, a lasting unknown.”
