In Awe [Paperback]

Scott Heim (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1998

Sarah, Harriet and Boris are outcasts searching for solace in their own private fantasy worlds. Mourning the recent death of her best friend, Marshall, Sarah tries to find comfort in the countless horror movies she loves. Harriet, Marshall's mother, grieves by immersing herself in the serenity of her farm. Then there is Boris. A sixteen-year-old orphan with dreams of writing the ultimate zombie novel, he spends his nights sneaking away from a youth home and his days dreaming of Rex, a beautiful but savage classmate. It is this fascination that sets in motion a violent chain of events that ultimately tests the boundaries of the three misfits' obsessions and leads the novel to its brutal and startling conclusion.

"Nimble, alarming, complex, and lushly written."
--New York Post

"Elegantly written."
--Time Out New York

"[Heim] teases out the pleasures of cruelty in language that scalpels one minute, unfurls lushly the next."
Village Voice

"Grand, uncanny, horrific and sweet. . . . Those who give themselves to it will be haunted."
--Lambda Book Report

"Unforgettable. . . . Quite simply, In Awe is awesome: inordinately powerful and alarming, terrifying and breathtaking. A transcendent, bittersweet novel of obsession and pain, love and loathing, memory and desire. Heim is testing the limits of his dynamic, raw vision."
-Kansas City Star

"The ripple of danger beneath the surface of Scott Heim's In Awe should serve as a warning to anyone expecting a casual ride: this is a book that means to take you places. A patina of malevolence overhangs Heim's Kansas, and even the quietest moments can have the most terrifying consequences for his trio of misfits, Boris, Sarah, and Harriet. The story draws us forward toward its heart like the best of spiderwebs."
--Jim Grimsley

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The poetic language of In Awe places images like mutilated mannequins and a defunct miniature golf course in a weird, dark Kansas setting. Scott Heim's lyrical tale of three outcasts (a 17-year-old boy, a 32-year-old woman, and an old woman) works its eerie magic on two levels. On one level, it's about people so vilified by society that their ambitions come from horror stories: Boris is writing a story in which the three friends will rise from the grave "with worms on [their] wrists like gray bracelets" and wreak zombie vengeance, and Sarah wants to "star in movies where everyone will suffer sobbing and she alone will survive for top billing in the sequels." On another level, it's about an obsessive desire for a love object (Boris's for another boy he sees as "half-hyena, half-swan") that is so fierce, it can only be consummated in death. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Kirkus Reviews

Our Gang meets Godzilla in a leather bar on the Great Plains, in Heim's disappointing follow-up to Mysterious Skin (1995). Within a particular gay subculture, Kansas may function as a kind of byword for homoerotic camp, but for most people who've never been there it sounds like a quiet enough place where very little goes on. They'll hardly be prepared, then, for life in Lawrence, the university town where Boris, Harriet, and Sarah have formed one of the most unlikely trios since the brothers Karamazov. Harriet, in her 60s, was the mother of Marshall, who was a friend and mentor to the gay Boris and the prodigiously heterosexual Sarah, both of them CINCs (Children in Need of Care) from the local juvenile detention center. Marshal died recently, and his mother acts out her grief by hanging with his two teenaged friends, both creative types themselves: Boris is writing a horror novel for school, and Sarah is fascinated by cinema. Sarah's obsessive nymphomania, which landed her in the juvenile home in the first place, has come back to haunt her in the person of Rex, a local redneck who's stalking her. Boris, in love with Rex, would give anything to be stalked, but Rex doesn't know he's alive. There are vivid, detailed flashbacks describing Sarah's sexual adventures. There are lyrical and sad flashbacks describing Harriet's recollections of her son. There are scenes from Boris's novel. And there is a confused subplot concerning the disappearance of young girls in town, with all the usual suspicions and hysteria, that adds up to little in the end. Heim is a master of unnecessary detail who badly overestimates the amount of literary freight his train can pull. In a contrived and obvious climax, his story finally seems not so much fulfilled as denuded. Empty posturing without much lurking behind it, save adolescent nihilism and more than a hint of misogyny. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Harperflamingo (June 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060929200
• ISBN-13: 978-0060929206
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #862,059 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I'm the author of the novels MYSTERIOUS SKIN (1995, made into a 2005 film by Gregg Araki); IN AWE (1997), and WE DISAPPEAR (2008), all from HarperCollins / HarperPerennial.

I was born and raised in various small towns in the center of Kansas. I went to the University of Kansas in Lawrence, and moved to New York City in 1991 to get my MFA degree at Columbia University. After 11 years in New York, I moved to Boston in 2002, and that's where I'm currently living.

My personal website is www.scottheim.com, and I have a weblog at www.heim.etherweave.com/weblog.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A GEN-X FAULKNER ON ACID WRITING HORROR, November 19, 2004

By 

Owen Keehnen (Chicago) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: In Awe (Paperback)

As a fan of horror movies and overall 'eerie-ness' I thoroughly enjoyed Heim's second novel (after the also recommended MYSTERIOUS SKIN). IN AWE is certainly one of the most original, poetic, amd menacing gay novels outside of Dennis Cooper's work in recent memory. It's a moody and atmospheric horror movie with deep literary significance (Imagine a Gen-X Faulkner on acid writing a horror novel - and toss in equal parts Shirley Jackson, Dennis Cooper, and David Lynch). This meticulously crafted novel follows a season in the STRANGE lives of 3 Lawrence Kansas misfits. The completely absorbing and slightly surreal plot defies succinct description but includes mutilated mannequins, a vile of urine, and numerous other surprises. Suffice it to saw IN AWE is one hell of a ride. Demented, evocative, descriptive, deeply profound, and not recommended for the squeamish...big ole GORE ALERT...and I'm not talking former VP Al or his wife Tipper. The characters were a bit tough for me to get a handle on...but the strongest presence in this novel is that overall menacing mood and that holds it all together.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Try again, Scott Heim, March 1, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: In Awe (Paperback)

Personally, I couldn't finish it. The prose had moments of beauty, but was mostly florid and overbaked. I don't mind unpleasantness in fiction, but how much is too much? I thought "Mysterious Skin" was intermittently great and full of potential -- let's hope this was a sophomore slump. I love to see a young gay writer putting out novels, especially ones set outside the NY-LA-SF triangle. I'm already looking forward to Scott Heim's next novel, and here's hoping it's a little more . . . down to earth.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully written passages... that don't really describe anything important, August 18, 2009

By 

soursimon (Toronto, On) - See all my reviews

This review is from: In Awe (Hardcover)

When I started reading this, I was immediately reminded of a book from my grade-school years called "Painted Devil" by Michael Bedard (Not to say "In Awe" was childish.) "Painted Devil" stood out from many other books targeting that age-group because of its unusually depressing writing style. There wasn't a single spot of humour anywhere to be found; everything the character looked at reminded them of death, disease, poverty or ghosts. "In Awe" was similar in that every sentence was completely lacking in happiness. Everything was about sorrow, longing or death. Some may like that stuff (I do), others might find the book to be just a bit too dark for them.

Cons:
<RAIN> I personally don't know anything about Kansas, but one incredibly annoying cliché that SOAKED and SATURATED the book was that during every incident/event that occurred in the story, it was either raining, was about to start raining, or had just finished raining. If it rains a lot in Kansas, then Heim is being faithful to the meteorology of Kansas; if not, then he certainly DROWNED the story with that metaphoric device.</RAIN>

The main downfall of the story exists as the extreme-exaggeration of Boris' (one of the protagonists) puppy-love for a fellow schoolmate. This obsession didn't just border on the creepy and disgusting, it made the creepy and disgusting look Saintly. Not to mention that after a while, you just get sick of hearing about it (much like real life; we've all had those friends with mad crushes). Being a gay author, Heim also made sure that his story contained at least one surviving gay-male protagonist to keep the gay-theme going throughout his writing. Forget diversity! Why a gay author feels that he has to consistently write about homosexuality is beyond me.

Pros:
Scott Heim is an incredible writer. There were actually a few passages I read over and over because they were just too descriptive and real to skip over once. He described things in a very specific way that sometimes reminded me of the strange irrelevant thoughts that cross our own minds from time to time. His writing talent added quite the human element to this book.