Matt Bell reads at Elliott Bay Book Company tonight at 7 pm.

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Most writers complain of an affliction that strikes when they get too tired or they've written too much in a day, or when they're not writing about something they care about: They fall into The Zone, a place where characters stop doing things that feel normal, when locations unmoor from the earth and float around and change shape, when the writing becomes more about the writing itself than a person or place or thing. Matt Bell's novel In the House upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods (Soho, $25)—hereafter, for the sake of my aching word count, referred to as House—reads like it takes place entirely in The Zone.

House begins, "Beneath the unscrolling story of new sun and stars and then-lonely moon," when the narrator's wife "began to sing some new possessions into the interior of our house." Physics don't work as you'd expect them to, characters are never named, and no other entirely human characters besides these two will come onto the scene for the rest of the book's 312 pages. The number of concrete things is slim: We have a house, though the interiors are always shifting. Outside the house are woods and a lake, where our protagonist hunts and fishes. Somewhere in the woods, there's a bear lurking around.

And the protagonist's wife fades in and out of attention; she becomes pregnant, and then something bad happens and her grief manipulates their world, becomes solid and puts distance between them. House feels like a Tolkien epic set inside Plato's cave written by Carl Jung, and it's just as frustrating and mind-boggling and satisfying as you'd expect a book with that description to be.

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