- Click on the book to order direct from the publisher. They get more money that way.
How They Were Found is a book made out of contradictions. Characters die left and right, but still there is hope. Everyone is looking to stitch together a ruptured world, to map nonexistent places and open doors into them, to make sense of the senseless, but still there is careful order and architecture. There are passionate stories about the most sensitive subjects, delivered in calm, measured prose, in carefully constructed architectures.
In the story “Wolf Parts,” Bell takes the Little Red Riding Hood myth and puts it through a tumbler. Out falls a series of gems, polished stones of shape, colours and meaning. Bell builds the story out of several dozen short permutations: Red being eaten, Red eating, Red sacrificed by the villagers, and always there is howling.
“On four legs he could easily devour her, could take her in his jaws as fast as he could any deer or rabbit. But on two? On two she was often the one who mastered him.”
This article appears in Dec 16-22, 2010.
