MATT BELL. THE COLLECTORS. CAKETRAIN

If that cover isn't enough to arouse your genitals. Check this mess out:

“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 “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, Matt 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.

Additonal info, including how to order, is HERE:

http://www.caketrain.org/collectors.html