Salvaging a story

The book is written as a first-person narrative of the protagonist, Kelly, a scrapper who ekes out a living by salvaging copper, metal and anything salable from the abandoned homes and buildings of Detroit.

“For the greater part of the book, Kelly is within himself, which is part of the mood of the book,” Bell said. “It’s tragic that even when he’s with others, he’s alone.”

In the first third of the book, Bell sets up the story, telling us about Kelly and his new girlfriend, Jackie, who is weary from listening to horror stories every day as an emergency dispatcher. When they first meet, Jackie walks with a limp. We gradually learn that she has a debilitating illness from which there is no recovery.

The inspiration for the book, Bell said, was a three-minute clip from a documentary he watched on scrapping.

“That was the seed of the book, and it gave me an avenue of talking about Detroit,” Bell said. “In the last book, (“In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods,”) there was no room for politics or culture.”

Bell also tried to avoid the popular clichés that often show up in Detroit writings — clichés that paint a post-apocalyptic picture of a once a great city.

“Detroit has a lot of people imposing their narrative on it, so it was important for me to have a narrator who is an outside viewer,” he said. Kelly, although originally from Detroit, had left the area for more than a decade before returning to the city. Like his character, Bell is also a Detroit outsider.

“I’m not from Detroit,” he said.

The author did not let that deter him. He spent time in Detroit researching his novel with a photographer who documents the city’s deterioration. Bell tried to strike a balance in his focus on scrappers, being careful to neither glorify nor to denigrate them.

“Lots of people think (scrappers) are lazy and don’t want to work,” he said. “That’s not the case. It’s incredibly dangerous and hard work. Mostly scrappers do it out of desperation.”

In one scene, Kelly reflects on instances of other scrappers being shot, electrocuted or otherwise maimed. Most of the cases, Bell said, came directly from the news.

The author could’ve easily settled for a straightforward novel about the hard and dangerous life of a scrapper, but the novel takes a decidedly darker turn when Kelly discovers a kidnapping victim in an abandoned house he is scrapping. This sets Kelly on a path of vengeance against the kidnapper. Bell said that the book did not start out that way, but it developed organically.

“For me, the best book is one that generates its own plot,” he said.

Suffice it to say, Kelly does some ugly things in the course of the book, which may be why Publisher’s Weekly said the book has the feel of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road.”

Bell said that the kidnapping and other crimes he wrote about in the book are based on either real news stories or stories that Detroit residents had told him.

“The stories are in the air,” he said. “Some are actual, some are urban legends.”

At its core, the book is a love story intertwined with a morality tale and a reflection on how we find redemption through confronting evil. Tensions escalate as the book’s tragic ending nears — and even the writer was troubled by the course the story took.

“The last third of the book was hard to write,” Bell said, adding that he wrote the book’s climactic scene backward when he saw the dark path the book was taking.

“There was so much to talk about in this book, such as the cycles of violence and the interface scrapping has with the rest of the world, where a battery thrown away in Detroit ends up on the other side of the world,” Bell said.