In 18th-century Ohio, two brothers travel into the wooded frontier, planting apple orchards from which they plan to profit in the years to come. The long-held bonds and secrets between the two will be tested, fractured and broken --- and possibly healed. Fifty years from now, climate change has ravaged the Earth. One company now owns all the world’s resources. But a growing resistance is working to redistribute both land and power --- and one of the company’s original founders intends to destroy what he helped build. A thousand years in the future, North America is covered by a massive sheet of ice. One lonely sentient being inhabits a tech station on top of the glacier --- and sets out to follow a homing beacon across the continent in the hopes of discovering the last remnant of civilization.

A 19th-century minister builds an elaborate motor that will bring about the Second Coming. A man with rough hands locks a boy in a room with an albino ape. An apocalyptic army falls under a veil of forgetfulness. The story of Red Riding Hood is run through a potentially endless series of iterations. A father invents an elaborate, consuming game for his hospitalized son. Indexes, maps and a checkered shirt buried beneath a blanket of snow are scattered through these pages as clues to mysteries that may never be solved. A TREE OR A PERSON OR A WALL brings together Matt Bell’s previously published shorter fiction, along with seven dark and disturbing new stories.

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 celebrated as a hero, Kelly secretly avenges the boy’s unsolved kidnapping, a task that will take him deeper into the zone and into a confrontation with his own past and long-buried traumas.

A newly-wed couple escapes the busy confusion of their homeland for a distant and almost-uninhabited lakeshore. They plan to live there simply, but as their every pregnancy fails, the husband begins to rage at this new world: the song-spun objects somehow created by his wife's beautiful singing voice, the giant and sentient bear that rules the beasts of the woods, the second moon weighing down the fabric of their starless sky, and the labyrinth of memory dug into the earth beneath their house.