Scrapper
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A man embarks on a desperate quest for redemption in a devastated Detroit, in this novel that “has the feel of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road . . . 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, Kelly is celebrated as a hero. But even after he has brought the boy to safety, he is driven to secretly avenge this crime and solve the mystery behind the kidnapping—a task that will take him deeper into the zone, and into a confrontation with his own past and long-buried traumas.
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?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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 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.
