[Love is] a notoriously difficult subject for writers, though god knows it hasn't stopped them from trying, with very mixed results. It's rare that somebody gets it right, which is why Matt Bell's debut novel, In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods, is so remarkable. It's one of the most thoughtful recent works of fiction on a subject that defeats many writers before they pick up their pens ... It's hard to imagine a book more difficult to pull off, but Bell proves as self-assured as he is audacious. His prose, which manages to be both mournful and propulsive, is undeniable. While he's been compared to authors like Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges, his style is very much his own, lacking any obvious antecedent. In the House contains passages far scarier than most mainstream horror novels, but Bell writes with a warmth, a humanity that renders the scenes gut-wrenching on an emotional level. Characters in fairy tales are often stand-ins for ideas, props used to illustrate a moral. Bell does a superb job of avoiding this trap, though; he writes about the family with both a clear sense of empathy and an expert novelist's unblinking eye.Bell's novel isn't just a joy to read, it's also one of the smartest meditations on the subjects of love, family and marriage in recent years.

It’s hard to describe how strange and powerful Matt Bell’s first novel, In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods, is. It is a boldly experimental work, opening up previously untapped territory for contemporary fiction ... It centers on recognizable characters: a young married couple, struggling to make a new life together. Yet it also features a talking bear and a mythical squid, a quest through an underground labyrinth and songs that can call the stars out of the sky ... The book, filled with internal rhymes and heavy alliteration, begs to be read aloud. It’s a driving, oral epic that reads like poetry ... Bell has set himself a difficult task, and not everything works. Sometimes what he wants to be bizarrely powerful is just bizarre. At other times, the novel’s hypermasculine tone grates. But these flaws are the necessary price of Bell’s ambitions. In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods is an extraordinary achievement, telling a most ancient story in a way that feels uncannily new.

Told in layers, fractured into sections, unfolding in a grand tapestry that weaves emotions and actions into a complex series of destinies and consequences, this novel is not an easy read. But the reward is dense prose, powerful psychoanalysis, and the unsettling feeling that our own actions today—many miles from the woods with its failing bear, and its lake with its undulating squid—might be bound by similar rules and outcomes ... You can certainly compare this dense, powerful, and heartbreaking novel to other fabulists, such as Kafka, Calvino, and Borges, but Matt Bell’s writing also owes a debt of gratitude to Cormac McCarthy, Kelly Link, Benjamin Percy, and Aimee Bender. In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods can only really be compared and assigned to one voice—Matt Bell’s—which is unique, innovative, captivating, and hypnotic in a way that only he can make it. This is a book that will be talked about, dissected, and shared for years to come because it is not only his story, it is our story—every single one of us.

The story is timeless, and it could be told in countless ways ... In his debut novel...the short-story writer Matt Bell takes the mythic route, using ritualistic, almost biblical language to describe the dissolution of a marriage between an unnamed man and woman ... On the surface, Mr. Bell has written a gripping, grisly tale of a husband’s descent into and ultimate emergence from some kind of personal hell ... Taken singly, Mr. Bell’s descriptions are eerie and hypnotic; sometimes they can even be lovely. And the anguish that pervades this work seems heartfelt. But the worldview presented here is rather antediluvian, particularly in its depiction of gender relations. As the novel proceeds, the reader may start to think that the author is employing his dense language to obfuscate meaning, to conceal a paucity of ideas rather than to express a slew of them ...readers may be left thinking that Ernest Hemingway was right when he wrote in The Garden of Eden, 'Know how complicated it is and then state it simply.' Understanding how simple a story is, then making it complicated, turns out to be considerably less gratifying.

Beware. A novel like this — not that there are many like it — presents a peculiar challenge. I don’t necessarily want to scare you away, but I’d hate to see you stumble into The Lake and the Woods expecting anything like [Karen] Russell’s witty alligator farm. Think instead of the magical realism of her most bizarre story in St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. Then imagine that story chanted by a druid on mushrooms ... Bell is working in a tradition that ­stretches from Aimee Bender to Richard Brautigan to Walt Whitman and much, much further back into the mists of myth. For readers weary of literary fiction that dutifully obeys the laws of nature, here’s a story that stirs the Brothers Grimm and Salvador Dali with its claws ... Bell is doing fascinating, unnerving things here in his exploration of the most painful aspects of family life. This is the Oedipal complex flipped on its head ... But like its title, In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods runs on longer than it should ... Eventually, his ideas are buried in the house upon the dirt between the lake and the woods by the bear and the squid and the fingerling and the moon and the cave and the stars and . . .Well, you get the idea.

Bell’s writing is both highly lyrical and dark. He can pen a beautiful sentence and embroider it with foreboding ... Much of the book feels like a nightmare, with events connected only loosely to their apparent causes and violence lurking everywhere. Readers looking for a clear plot and sympathetic characters are likely to be disappointed. Bell is aiming for something more innovative, and he sacrifices readability ... For this reviewer, the agony of watching those characters suffer for little apparent reason makes the book a tough slog. And at times, Bell seems to be showing off his literary chops rather than telling a story. But those who enjoy surrealist stories or mining a novel for its themes will find much to occupy them.

Nothing good can come of this world, and nothing does. Though it starts in a place of inoffensive and even lovely magic, every chapter brings some new horror or perversion. Everything human leaks away and is replaced with doppelgängers and monsters, ursine hybrids, people-turned-animals, bodies deprived of anything that might make them real ... The strangeness is unrelenting. When trying to follow the novel becomes a challenge, the reader becomes like the husband: blindly groping deeper and deeper into the darkness ... While thematically appropriate, [the] language can occasionally become exhausting — the diction is so lofty that it is easy to feel a little lost ... In the end, the problem might be as simple as the text running too long — what is 300 pages could have easily been half that ... I am supportive of Bell’s career and a fan of much of his work, but I found this particular project to be messy and ultimately unsatisfying ... But I will continue to follow Bell’s future work with interest—because despite his efforts to isolate, there is ultimately something deeply tangible and haunting about this non-place, about the people who are living and suffering there.

Intersecting fabulist mythology and domestic realism, Bell takes as familiar a theme as a couple escaping the confines of civic life and turns this paradigm into a constantly shifting platform on which nothing is ever firmly on its feet ... Isolation allows the artist to use a default setting: man, wife, tools. Uncovering every surface of this constriction Bell carves from one piece of wood a thousand faces ... It is meticulous, but it is not a tactical novel. If you remove a piece it would fall like its eponymous house into the ground It has the subtle mark of a feeling construction, a felt design ... Trying to sum up compactly what it all means leads me back to the starting-line of the novel: Undeliverable. Read Matt Bell’s new novel eavesdropping intently and what you will hear draws you closer and closer to the door.

...a dark, intriguingly odd fable about what it means to be a father ... This challenging, boldly experimental attempt at myth-building may resonate with equally ambitious readers, but offers fewer rewards to those looking for narrative pleasures.

Bell cultivates a loose sense of unreality that allows the reader to make all sorts of metaphorical projections. But the novel is also meticulously designed, with a particular focus on the musicality of its sentences, and the narrative’s general arc of adventure and discovery is relatively conventional ... Some of Bell’s heavily symbolic adventuring grows too repetitive to sustain a full-length novel—there’s a reason Jorge Borges stuck with short stories—but there’s an undeniably heartfelt tone to this tale that transcends its unusual cast.