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60 of 62 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Taking You Places You May Not Want to Go... But Ought To, June 28, 2005
Great literature gives us fascinating characters. Daring literature takes us places we may not want to go. Among the fascinating people roaming the streets today few can be as weirdly interesting as the homosexual who offers himself up for a "good time" by scrawling his phone number on a public bathroom stall or the loopy individual who is chillingly convinced he has been abducted by aliens. You have to wonder who these people are and what damaged background could've led them to such outlandish behavior. In Scott Heim's stunning book Mysterious Skin he suggests that both behaviors could've been triggered by the same trauma, and by the time you are done reading, you will be convinced too.
Neil and Brian are two eight year old boys who have been sexually abused by their Little League coach, but their two reactions couldn't be more different. Neil is already aware of his homosexuality when he meets the coach. His father is dead and his mother is a provocative though loving drunk. Neil fancies himself in love with the coach and readily submits to all that is asked of him. Brian, on the other hand, is the product of a loving family, and one that is mildly dysfunctional in ways that could be considered more normal than "normal". For Brian the experience is so painfully disturbing that he buries it in his subconscious, blacking it out so that as the years unwind he becomes fascinated with what happened to him during his "lost hours", eventually reaching the conclusion that he was abducted by aliens.
As time goes on, Neil, who at first seems to be coping with the pedophilia on the basis of it being a homosexual encounter, eventually becomes obsessed with humiliating sex with older men and seeks out his liaisons by writing his phone number on the insides of bathroom stalls, behavior that leads to indiscriminate hustling. Brian, whose dreams provide him with eerie snippets of information about being held against his will, latches on to a woman he sees on a television special about alien abductions and contacts her seeking answers.
The depth and complexity of these characters is arresting. Heim does an excellent job of building empathy in the reader and is especially good at making the distinction between homosexuality and pedophilia, showing that young people who are homosexuals can still be damaged by pedophilia, albeit in more subtle but no less excruciating ways. In the end, one is left with the sense that as horrible as the experience was for Brian, who is a heterosexual, the healing can start once he's learned to face what's happened. But for Neil, whose willingness to cooperate in his own abuse, even to convince himself that it was desirable, it has set him on a course seeking ugly, risky sex that must ultimately destroy him.
Needless to say, Mysterious Skin is not for the faint of heart. The morally squeamish will be tempted to characterize it as pornographic, forgetting that pornography is defined as that which is "gratuitous, having no moral or social value." This is certainly not true of Mysterious Skin. True, it is chocked full of graphic sex scenes which will disturb and revolt, but all are in service to the greater theme of how those victimized and damaged by situations out of their control must find common cause in seeking answers that can redeem them, a laudable moral observation and one far more constructive than brushing such horrors under the rug or dismissing pedophiles and homosexuals as equally objectionable.
Heim is a fine writer, a poet whose descriptions are often startling and beautiful. The book has a compelling narrative construction, building the stories of the two boys on parallel paths until they gradually converge. And he does a terrific job with secondary characters, showing how they influence and are touched by the protagonists in ways that are different but no less important than they first anticipated.
My only objection is the development of a friendship later in the book between Brian and one of Neil's friends that seems unlikely, given their different experiences; but otherwise Mysterious Skin is valid, compelling and important, a book that takes you places you may not want to go but probably ought to if you want to understand the world and make it better.
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59 of 61 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A wonderful mess of a novel, September 5, 2004
This review is from: Mysterious Skin: A Novel (Paperback)
I'm a big fan of imdb.com, and somehow I stumbled upon the page for an upcoming movie called Mysterious Skin. It interested me, so I thought I'd check out the book. Well. I finished it about twenty minutes ago, and I'm speechless.
MYSTERIOUS SKIN has so many different characters, memorable quotes, and mind-boggling descriptions that I couldn't put it down. I'm not going to go into the full story, but the book is fantastic. Basically, it's about two boys that share a common bond, though neither of them know it in the beginning of the story. As the book advances, both characters (Brian Lackey and Neil McCormack) start to come to terms with an event that took place during the summer of 1981.
There are a few parts of the book that are extremely graphic, some pages were hard to read without putting the book down and trying to clear my mind. My short description does NOT do the book justice.
MYSTERIOUS SKIN is a fantastic novel, one that I wouldn't have chosen to read if I hadn't heard of the movie. This is definately the best book I've read in a loooong time. Highly recommended.
Overall grade - A+
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19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Frank (not sensationalist) prose about childhood sexual abuse, December 13, 2005
Two boys were sexually abused by their Little League coach in the summer of 1981. Neil McCormack spent the entire summer as Coach's lover, embracing his status as Coach's special friend, the recipient of attention, treats, and money. Brian Lackey, on the other hand, only had one incident with Coach, but he doesn't remember anything other than the fact that he lost several hours during the afternoon of a rained-out baseball game.
Brian grows up as a strange, skittish boy. He wets the bed and he knows something strange happened to him. Does UFO abduction explain his loss of memory? Fragments start to come back, and he desperately records them to make some sense of the missing time.
The only person who can explain Brian's missing time is Neil, who bullied younger boys after his summer with Coach and then grew into a sexual hustler in his teenage years. After high school, he headed off to NY to begin his hustling career in earnest.
The climax of the novel comes when Neil starts to view sexual abuse from another vantage point, and Brian gets the answers about the hours that went missing during his summer in Little League. The novel centers on the degree to which each boy was shaped by his experience with Coach, and how it stayed with them for life.
The prose is sexually frank, but not sensationalist. The mystery of what happened to Brian is tantalizing and unfolds gradually over the course of years. The journey makes for a great story. On a side note, the movie adaptation is very true to the book and makes an excellent companion to the novel. It's amazing to see the characters come to life on the big screen, exactly as they were portrayed in the narrative.
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