Customer Reviews

Mysterious Skin: A Novel

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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.

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+

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.

When I went to High School in Kansas I soon learned that an author had gone to the same one as me. After a few years, I found Scott Heim's first book "Mysterious Skin". I read it and it was like a punch in the chest. The story takes place in my community and amongst the people I thought I knew. I also share the same sexuality as the main character. I found the book to be a sweet and painful release to the suffering I've gone through in this state of Kansas. The hurt and horror of this book was all to familiar. Heim's words and language, his graphic paintings of reality, and his twists of beauty and perversity pour out onto the pages of this unworldy novel. Don't expect to read it and pass it off. His books will live in your memory for a long time. To take his work to heart is to look at this world with wider eyes. Definately, this book is a must. Even though the book hurts so much to read and you will want to put it away, you can't. And in the end, through the horror, you will see the beauty of his work.

This is a difficult read, as you might expect with any book that addresses childhood abuse. It's even more difficult because one of the characters believes he enjoyed being abused. This character, Neil, remembers what happened to him and consciously uses the experience to guide him through life. He becomes a hustler. Another character, Brian, has completely blocked out his abuse, to the extent that he wonders whether subsequent problems (bed-wetting, fainting, nosebleeds) are due to an alien abduction. He becomes obsessed with UFOs.

The novel is told through the perspectives of Neil and Brian and their contemporaries. The alternating perspectives help to drive home the sense of how alone these characters are in facing what happened to them. In some critical way, their experiences can't be shared, except perhaps with each other.

This fact drives a good portion of the plot, as Brian seeks to understand the truth of what happened to him.

Very disturbing but finally moving, thought-provoking, and worthwhile.

"Mysterious Skin" is Scott Heim's first novel and it is a powerful book that really moved me. This novel is about two damaged souls, Neil and Brian, who were sexual abused as children by their baseball coach. Heim tells this disturbing narration through various points of view. Throughout the book we follow the reprecussions of their abuse, and the psychological harm it has done to these two young men. Brian, once the abuse is over, believes that he has been abducted by aliens and spends part of the novel searching for the missing piece of time in his childhood. And then we have Neil, who also falls victim to the coach, but he believes the abuse was a sign of love, not a violation. Neil becomes the town's rock and roll queer who starts hustling at, of all places, the baseball field. As the novel progress we see Neil's preoccupation with hustling and Brian's obession with aliens. These preoccupations end with a brutal rape of Neil by a psychotic john, and for Brian a derailed sexual encounter with a repressed older woman who believes she too was abducted. Neil and Brian finally meet and the sad truth comes to the surface. Through both their troubled and unhappy pasts, and by exposing the horrific events of it, perhaps Neil and Brian are finally released for their misguidedness. Heim's style is fresh, and the book keeps the reader absorbed in the story. In seceral ways I really didn't want this story to end. I could have read another two hundred pages. To put it simply: It really touched me. A must read for everyone!!!!

I don't know what made me want to read Scott Heim's "Mysterious Skin." I don't know if it was the strange cover art, or the promising synopsis, or the fact that I knew it involved homosexuality. But whatever it was that drew me in, I'm extremely grateful for it.

"Mysterious Skin" involves two seemingly unrelated plots: one about Brian, a boy who can't remember a five-hour period of his life; and the other about Neil, a boy who realized at a very young age his attraction to other men and took advantage of it when his Little League coach stole his sexual innocence. Brian grows up gradually remembering bits and pieces of the night he awoke in his crawlspace dirty and bleeding, and even begins to suspect that he was the victim of an alien abduction. Neil grows up to be a teenage hustler, cruising parks and gay bars for older men to scam, never able to push away his desire for more mature lovers after the incidents with his coach.

The two stories flow separately through most of the book and come together toward the end. The combined tale that they tell is both heartbreakingly poignant and downright disturbing.

The author walks on extremely dangerous ground throughout most of "Mysterious Skin." He deals with difficult and controversial material, especially in the beginning. The scenes he writes are graphic, and it would be very easy to toss the book aside out of disgust. But these scenes are necessary, and the author knows it. The graphically described scenes of sexual relations are necessary to make us feel for the characters and to understand them. What could easily be trashy becomes beautiful when you realize why it is there.

"Mysterious Skin" is an emotion-filled, poignant work. It had a sort of power over me to make me care for the characters it introduced, and still does have that power as I find myself thinking about Neil and Brian every so often... as if they were my friends. And that is a remarkable accomplishment.

This book is a painfully honest examination of the human condition -- Heim doesn't shy away from important questions. I normally have a very low tolerance for violence. This book disturbed me (there are several violent scenes), but I nonetheless read every word. I picked up Mysterious Skin on a friend's offhand recommendation and found it very timely. It caused me to think seriously about what has been going on lately in the American Catholic Church. These are important topics: how adults use power to get sex with kids - how those adults might rationalize their own actions - how their behavior is often tolerated in closed communities -- and most of all, how these events can affect the victims. Even though this book was in some spots quite difficult to read, I am very glad I did. As long as our society deems these topics remain "too taboo to discuss," we will never address them properly. This is exactly the kind of book that can introduce us to the dark and unthinkable while allowing us the freedom to examine it in the bright light of day. Heim does not judge his characters, but allows the reader to decide.

All of this, and in a good literary package. It is a well crafted story. The journey may be fantastic, but the characters are amazingly real. My heart went out to every character in the book -- even the ones I hated. This is the mark of an excellent writer... If you are a broad-minded person who can handle having your assumptions challenged, READ IT!

It's been a while since I have read this book, but none of the others I have read previously or since have prompted me to seek out this chance to review. Definately one of the top three books I've read -- I only refrain from calling it the best because I read a lot and might not be thinking of everything. Much like the characters in the book (as well as the author) I was raised in Kansas and fled to a larger city when the first opportunity arose. Heim's description of the state was remarkably accurate, recalling the chilling winters and stark loneliness of the open plains so vividly I often took refuge at my window to reassure myself of where I was. More than that, the anguish he expresses reached so deeply into my psyche and touched something so familiar (yet I still have no recollection of what specifically) that I often closed a chapter with wailing sobs (unlike me) on my bed. This is not GAY FICTION as it is so often labeled. Such a classification is perverse on a book of this subject matter. Had the main characters been female, would this be categorized under erotica? It is a human story of ghastly intrusions that can happen to any one of us. Reading Mysterious Skin opens senses and emotions some may not realize they have and serves to better everyone's understanding of what we, at any age, may be subjected to. Final note: traditionally the last few pages of books disappoint me, but Mysterious Skin pleased me so much I copied the last page to keep before I loaned the book out. A thoroughly satisfying read that evokes thoughts few other books have even imagined. Bravo, Scott Heim!

Some books are made to affect the reader and make them feel emotions and make them disover worlds or situations they've never knew existed. Scott Heim's Mysterious Skin is a coming of age tale that holds nothing back. It's a fearless and unpretentious effort that will leave you breathless.

The book's complex narrative takes us through the minds of various characters (the novel is told in first person, using different characters to tell different parts of the story). The story starts when Brian and Neil are young boys. Although they are on the same baseball team, they do not know each other. Something happens to them that will mark them forever.

They both find different ways to deal with the event that left them mentally scarred. Many years later, Brian is certain that his blackouts and frequent nose bleeds can only be attributed to the fact that he was abducted by aliens. But as he grows older, the horrible truth slowly reveals itself to him and he quickly realizes that he needs to find Neil in order to put it all behind him.

Neil, on his part, deals with his past in a very different way. Working as an escort, Neil doesn't always know what he wants. He is a very reluctant character in that he thinks he knows who he is what he wants when, in fact, he's a complete stranger to himself. The only way he can find to deal with everything life hands him is through his body and his sexuality.

Offering very complex characters with even more complicated lives, Mysterious Skin is a powerful read that you won't be able to put down. The pain these characters feel just oozes off the page, affecting the reader in various ways. Just wait until Neil and Brian finally meet. Their confrontation is completely heartbreaking. It's almost impossible not to feel for these characters, almost impossible not to sympathize and empathize with them.

Mysterious Skin was Scott Heim's first novel. I can't wait to discover more from this writer. Mysterious Skin really left an impression on me. Highly recommended.