Matt Bell’s IN THE HOUSE UPON THE DIRT BETWEEN THE LAKE AND THE WOODS presents a lengthy fairy tale about love, loss and lies. It’s violent, dark and utterly heartbreaking.

The story centers on an unnamed husband and wife who eschew their families’ society beyond the mountains for a mystical world of their own. While most couples figuratively set out to create their own world, this couple does so literally. They live in a cave, while he builds their home and they begin to plan their family.

This mythic world is far removed from our own. She is able to sing things to life and into existence, even at one point a looming second moon that carries a promise and a threat. There is a menacing, sentient bear roaming and ruling the woods, while a squid haunts the lake. He fishes for their dinner, and she sings to create their household needs.

"The book wisely denies the reader and the characters easy resolutions, but does offer at least a glimmer of hope. Bell has crafted a frightening world inhabited by complex and imperfect characters, and by doing so, he has also written a wonderful novel."

At last they are expecting, but the pregnancy ends in a miscarriage. In the first of many shocking acts by the narrator, he consumes the stillborn child while his wife is unconscious. He wants the child to be a part of him, as it had been a part of his wife. From this point forward, the potential of that child never leaves the husband and is a constant reminder of what could have been. He gives a voice to the husband’s darker impulses.

They suffer many failed attempts at having children. She announces she is pregnant a final time. There is a son, but the husband is immediately suspicious about the child’s origin. From here, the deceptions and betrayals between them pile up.

As their emotional relationship changes, so their world changes around them. The house grows larger, emptier. The bear begins to encroach upon the house. The wife’s appetites turn bloodier, as she rejects the fish caught by her husband for her. Their child fears the father. The lost child in the husband sows doubt and discontent in his father. They even betray the creatures and the order of the world around them.

IN THE HOUSE UPON THE DIRT BETWEEN THE LAKE AND THE WOODS gives the reader intriguing metaphors for what it means to have a marriage, to be a parent, to suffer a miscarriage, and to grow apart. It evokes the sense of living with the memory and consequence of one’s actions.The language, tone and events of the book are biblical or mythological. Every change in their relationship marks a change in their physical world. In the words of the husband, “And now our story was ending, and so also its world.”

In a clever juxtaposition, because their world is so small, each element becomes monumentally important. There are no wasted moments or characters to be found. Bear or Lake or Moon take on far more meaning than they would to characters in the regular, physical world. Each element becomes an embodiment of anger or violence or heartbreak.

The book wisely denies the reader and the characters easy resolutions, but does offer at least a glimmer of hope. Bell has crafted a frightening world inhabited by complex and imperfect characters, and by doing so, he has also written a wonderful novel.