In the Spotlight: Scott Heim

[reviews_and_ramblings]

The Book: The body of a teenage boy is discovered in a Kansas field. The murder haunts Donna—a recent widow battling cancer—calling forth troubling details from long-suppressed memories of her past. Hoping to discover more about "disappeared" people, she turns to her son, Scott, who is fighting demons of his own. Addicted to methamphetamines and sleeping pills, Scott is barely holding on—though the chance to help his mother in her strange and desperate search holds out a slim promise of some small salvation.

But what he finds is a boy named Otis handcuffed in a secret basement room, and the questions that arise seem too disturbing even to contemplate. With his mother's health rapidly deteriorating, he must surrender to his own obsession, and unravel Otis's unsettling connections to other missing teens . . . and, ultimately, to Scott himself.

Amazon: We Disappear: A Novel (P.S.)

The Author: Scott Heim (born 1966) is an American novelist from Hutchinson, Kansas, currently living in Massachusetts. Heim's first novel, Mysterious Skin, was published in 1995.

He grew up in a small farming community there, and later attended the University of Kansas in Lawrence, earning a B.A. in English and Art History in 1989 and an M.A. in English Literature in 1991. He attended the M.F.A. program in Writing at Columbia University, where he wrote his first novel, Mysterious Skin. HarperCollins published that book in 1996, and Scott followed it with another novel, In Awe, in 1997.

Scott has won fellowships to the London Arts Board as their International Writer-in-Residence, and to the Sundance Screenwriters Lab for his adaptation of Mysterious Skin. He is also the author of a book of poems, Saved from Drowning (1993).

After living eleven years in New York, he relocated to Boston in 2002. Mysterious Skin was adapted for the stage, premiering in San Francisco; it was subsequently adapted to film by director Gregg Araki and Antidote Films. Scott's third novel is We Disappear (HarperCollins), published in February 2008.

Heim's fiction, nonfiction, and reviews have appeared in The Village Voice, Out, The Advocate, Interview, Time Out New York, Nerve, Christopher Street, The Minnesota Review, and many other periodicals.

http://heim.etherweave.com/

Top 100 Gay Novels List (*)

External Link to the Top 100 Gay Novels List (simple - without photos)

External Link to the Top 100 Gay Novels List (wanted - with photos)

*only one title per author, only print books released after January 1, 2000.

Other titles not in the top 100 list:

http://www.librarything.com/catalog/top50MM

Comments

[ashmedai.livejournal.com]

I loved Mysterious Skin, and this sounds like another good one. Thanks for the review! :)

[elisa-rolle.livejournal.com]

This is probably not my cup of tea, but with this weekly spotlight I want to give a space to various genre and authors. Glad to help you finding something new. From the review of this new book by Scott Heim (not mine), it should be good. Elisa