The Collectors, by Matt Bell
August 2, 2009 caketrain 18 other publications
Matt Bell’s “The Collectors” was chosen by Brian Evenson as the runner-up manuscript in the 2008 Caketrain Chapbook Competition. The tale of compulsive hoarders Homer and Langley Collyer so shocked 1940s Manhattan that the brothers and their Harlem brownstone live on today as one of the most notable American case studies of acute disposophobia. With a nervous energy and obsession to match his protagonists, Matt Bell’s prose burrows, forensically, into the layers of the brothers’ lives, employing a multilinear narrative structure and a frenetic plurality of perspectives to reach a core of despair that is both terrifyingly primal and distressingly familiar.
Matt Bell’s “The Collectors” was chosen by Brian Evenson as the runner-up manuscript in the 2008 Caketrain Chapbook Competition. The tale of compulsive hoarders Homer and Lang...
