And then at last, at last, the age of seeds.
And then. And then. And then.
And then every morning, some new and constant sun, born upon the horizon.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to the editors and staff of the following publications, where portions of Cataclysm Baby previously appeared: Alice Blue, American Short Fiction, Annalemma, Anthills, Artvoice, Everyday Genius, FANZINE, Gargoyle, Guernica, JMWW, > kill author, Knee-Jerk, The Literary Review, Ninth Letter, Poor Claudia, Puerto del Sol, The Reprint, Sleepingfish, TripleQuick Fiction, Wigleaf, and Wrong Tree Review.
Thanks to David McLendon for serving as the first editor of Cataclysm Baby, and for his invaluable friendship throughout the writing of it; to Dan Wickett, Steven Gillis, Brad Green, Sean Kilpatrick, Elizabeth Ellen, Wendell Mayo, Lawrence Coates, Michael Czyzniejewski, and all my colleagues at Bowling Green State University for being early readers of the manuscript that became this book.
“Walker, Wallace, Warren” owes a debt to “Applewood Figure,” kept in the permanent collection of the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore—and to Michael Kimball and Tita Chico, for making sure I saw it.
“Xarles, Xavier, Xenos” owes a similar debt of inspiration to Mike McCormack’s “The Terms,” which it wouldn’t exist without.
Most importantly, thanks always to my wife Jessica, whose love and support enables every word.
About the Author
Matt Bell is also the author of How They Were Found, a collection of fiction. His work has appeared in Conjunctions, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Gulf Coast, and Willow Springs, and has been anthologized in Best American Mystery Stories and Best American Fantasy, as well as shortlisted for Best American Short Stories. He can be contacted at www.mdbell.com.
The Mud Luscious Press Novel(la) Series:
WE TAKE ME APART
MOLLY GAUDRY
AN ISLAND OF FIFTY
BEN BROOKS
WHEN ALL OUR DAYS ARE NUMBERED MARCHING BANDS WILL FILL THE STREETS & WE WILL NOT HEAR THEM BECAUSE WE WILL BE UPSTAIRS IN THE CLOUDS
SASHA FLETCHER
GRIM TALES
NORMAN LOCK
THE HIEROGLYPHICS
MICHAEL STEWART
I AM A VERY PRODUCTIVE ENTREPRENEUR
MATHIAS SVALINA
THE OREGON TRAIL IS THE OREGON TRAIL
GREGORY SHERL
CATACLYSM BABY
MATT BELL
DAD SAYS HE SAW YOU AT THE MALL
KEN SPARLING
THE ALLIGATORS OF ABRAHAM
ROBERT KLOSS
Praise for Cataclysm Baby
“In extraordinary language, with deep feeling, Matt Bell has crafted a baby name book for the apocalypse, a gorgeous, brilliant, often darkly hilarious and always moving novella. Written with an ingenuity and joy that call to mind Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, each chapter is a treasure: Here are beast of burden children, larval girls, subterranean daughters and choirs of sirens, combustible baby boys. I loved this book and want to recommend it to every human parent and child I know; if trees, rocks, and stars were literate, I would recommend it to them, too. "Where do babies come from?" children ask their parents, and Cataclysm Baby has an alphabet of answers as beautiful and mysterious as that ancient question, while always posing its haunting corollary: ‘Where do they go?’”
“You can read Matt Bell’s apocalyptic abecedarium as a grotesque allegory of the devastations of parenthood, or as a grim realist extrapolation evoked by our crumbling world order. But these lovely, harrowing pieces do not float off into the Ideasphere; they remain tethered to the dusty, arid earth by their palpable nouns: baby, hair, teeth, womb, seed, porridge, hut, crib, bone, mouth, hatchet, shovel, flesh. Like The Red Cavalry Stories or The Age of Wire and String, Cataclysm Baby is both surreal and vividly concrete, as much a Feeling Experiment as a Thought Experiment. The trope of end time is always about revelation, and what is revealed here, among other things, is Bell’s brutal compassion.”
“The baby born as fur ball, the one who chews up its sibling in the womb, the amputated limbs, the child sacrifices, the girl untethered into the sky, the skewed biblical cadences and the mythic tropes, the continuous horror begot by parenthood and authority—Matt Bell’s collection of condensed narraticules, Cataclysm Baby, is Avant-Gothic at its most remarkable, unsettling, potent.”
“Here is the alphabet of the pulsing apocalypse that is fatherhood, a book in love with what words, like parents, create: beauty, terror, awe.”
Praise for How They Were Found
“Matt Bell has built a national reputation on his own terms, completely outside the support system of New York publishing, on the strength of his stories and novellas, which are wholly original and singularly his own. He is that rare sort of writer whose work the reader would recognize even if it were published anonymously. It is formally daring, high-stakes, languaged-up stuff.”
“With How They Were Found, Bell joins the company of the great fabulists like Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, and Italo Calvino, or closer to home, the American masters, Steven Millhauser, John Crowley, and Thomas Pynchon. These tales are mysterious, recondite without being just intellectual exercises, extravagant and fanciful, and ultimately winning. And [his] control of his material is imposing and his spectrum often dazzling.”
“Body toll notwithstanding, How They Were Found is anything but bleak. For one thing, there’s the prose: generous, urgent, rhythmic… his rhetorical repetitions echoing the events and obsessions on the page.”
“Bell doesn’t shy away from the ugliness of his character’s lives. Unlike many writers, he isn’t afraid to reveal their true natures… His fiction is honest and raw, frightening and powerful. His writing is lovely and moving—a perfect pairing for the grisly moments his protagonists face.”