Twenty years ago, I had an encounter with an author that changed my life. I was reading a new magazine called XY, which was geared toward young gay men and was full of erotic photos by the likes of Howard Roffman and Steven Underhill. It also had lifestyle and culture articles. One of these articles focused on three authors who wrote sexually provocative material. One of those authors was Scott Heim, and it’s not the text of the article that caused me to read his debut novel, Mysterious Skin, but rather the photo (above) of the author at 29. Someone this lovely on the outside had to possess something equally beautiful on the inside, right?
Over the
next few years, I would become such a fan that I had an ongoing email correspondence
with him, briefly designed and ran his official website (before he needed
something more polished and professional), shared some of my creative writing
with him, and would later direct Prince Gomolvilas’ adaptation of Mysterious
Skin as the first production for my first production company, Book of Dreams.
All of this represents some real emotional highs and lows for me, success and
failure, and eventually culminated in me not really being the fanboy I once
was. Oh well. It was fun while it lasted.
You may know
Mysterious Skin from a 2004 movie with Brady Corbet and Joseph Gordon Levitt.
And for what it’s worth, the movie is—for most intents and purposes—very good.
I have it, and I like to watch it with daring individuals who like gritty and
provocative storytelling. In this way, it represents the novel very well. Of
course, there’s a lot more to the book than “gritty and provocative”. It is
also full of rich imagery and lyrical beauty. It has the raw emotional punch of
ten novels. It’s a rather stunning coming-of-age meditation. It’s a Kansas
travelogue, which actually makes the state seem like someplace you’d want to
visit. All these things I would consider a trademark of the author.
Mysterious
Skin is about two young boys who have essentially the same traumatic experience
(sexual abuse by their little league coach) but interpret it in very different
ways. Brian blocks out the experience completely, and when fragments of memory
start to surface, he believes they are evidence of an alien abduction. Neil, on
the other hand, expands on this intro to the adult world of sex by finding lust
for his mother’s many boyfriends (who each remind him of idealized Coach),
discovering gay porn, and becoming a high school hustler. The novel, in a
nutshell, is about the journeys that both boys take from childhood to early
adulthood, as they discover the true significance and meaning behind what
really happened to them.
Of course, many other interesting
characters are introduced along the way: Brian’s prison-guard mom and college
sister, Deborah; Neil’s overly-carefree mother and fag-hag best friend Wendy;
Eric, the new gay in town who wants a deep connection with Neil, but has to
learn that such a thing does not exist. In the novel, Eric is my favorite
character, while the movie offered a version less than what I imagined. Then
there’s Avalyn, the lonely older woman who Brian reaches out to in his UFO explanation-seeking
after she was on a TV show talking about her own abduction experience. All
these characters are as vivid and bright as the rural Kansas landscape,
eventually juxtaposed with the mean streets and clubs of New York where Neil
realizes he can get more money for sex, but ends up with more than he bargained
for.
The novel has one of the most
brilliant and emotionally satisfying endings I’ve read, even as it leaves you
wishing for more. Mysterious Skin was a huge success in the gay lit market, and
the film was inevitable, despite the challenges of some pretty graphic and
extreme content. What’s more surprising was the play by Gomolvilas, which was
actually written before the film, and is different in many ways. I’ve written
some about my production of the play, so I’m not going to do that here.
Shortly after I read Mysterious
Skin, Scott Heim was at Powell’s doing a tour for his second novel, In Awe. I
brought a friend and showed up in my pin-striped baseball jersey style Foetus
shirt and sat in the front row, being all geeky and trying to think up
not-stupid questions to ask. When I met him and he signed my book, I felt
embarrassed like the geeky fanboy that I was.
I’m not sure why I started writing
to him after that point. Maybe it’s because I was in fact so dissatisfied with the
geeky fanboy meeting. We exchanged several emails before I even finished In
Awe. Part of this is because I’ve never been an avid reader anyway, and his
self-described maximalist style is sometimes challenging for someone who doesn’t
really indulge in a lot of casual reading. He’s very descriptive, and makes the
most of each sentence, each paragraph, and really relying on dialogue as little
as possible. When I finally finished, I remember not having the words to tell
him what the book meant to me. Somehow it overshadowed Mysterious Skin—at least
for me, maybe only for me—and that was no small achievement.
In Awe deals with three social
pariahs living in Lawrence, Kansas. Boris is a teenager who’s obsessed with a
boy at his school named Rex who, unfortunately for Boris, is part of a cadre of
dangerous and malicious country rednecks. Sarah is an adult woman, but doesn’t
adhere to most of the trappings of adulthood, as she hangs out with Boris,
helping him write his prize zombie novel and acting out scenes from horror
movies. The third person in this crew is Harriet, an older woman who lost her
son Marshall to AIDS-related illness. (Marshall used to be part of the gang of
misfits as well.) Soon, strange and
scary incidents start to happen. Acts of horrific violence, coupled with hate
crimes raged against this trios of unlikely friends, propel this suspenseful novel
to a shattering and breath-taking conclusion.
Alas, In Awe is not as easy to
categorize or sum up as Mysterious Skin, nor is it easy for me to explain why
it means so much to me as a pivotal work of influence and inspiration in my own
life. I couldn’t begin to tell you unless you first read it. It will likely
never be filmed, and Scott Heim actually found himself without a publisher in
the wake of this less commercially appealing work, as he was in the process of
writing his third novel.
After I read In Awe, I was compelled
to read his book of poetry, Saved From Drowing, which was actually published
before Mysterious Skin was, but in limited numbers, thus kind of hard to find.
Heim’s poetry is much like his prose. I would say actually that it is exactly
like his prose, but structured into verse form. If you hear it read aloud, you
hear a story, not anything that sounds remotely like verse. And indeed, some of
the poems in the book found their way into his novels, altered in some cases, sometimes
just the central themes remaining. Two of the biggest examples are “Turtle” (which
became an incident in Mysterious Skin) and “Brad, Bottom Drawer” (which
describes an obsessive behavior very much like Boris behaves with Rex in In
Awe). It was a revelation reading these, and seeing how ideas evolve from one
thing to another. It was an interesting peek into the creative process.
It took over a decade for Heim to
finish his third novel, We Disappear. The finished product ended up becoming
his most deeply personal work, as it dealt with depression and the loss of his
mother. It concerns the character of “Scott” who comes home, recovering from a
drug addiction, to care for his dying mom, Donna. From this framework, Heim
adds intrigue reminiscent of his second novel with the discovery of a murdered
teenage boy, and the obsession Scott shares with his mother regarding missing
persons: collecting articles, playing detective, and trying to imagine possible
outcomes.
There is a lot of potential in We
Disappear, but for me, its execution falls short. Maybe it’s because Heim is
torn between telling a fictional story and writing a memoir of his last days
with his mother. There is a shadow of sickness, addiction, depression, and despair
that covers this novel, making it a very difficult read if you’re not on the
right anti-depressant yourself. There are plot points that don’t pay off. There
are questions that don’t get answered…but not in the good way that the first
two novels leave you begging for more. This one just kind of ends, and you’re
relieved for it. At some point, I want to reread this and see if I have a
different reaction. But for now, it’s not a book I recommend.
There is a series of e-books that
Heim has published called The First Time I Heard…, in which he and other
writers describe their experiences first hearing favorite musicians. I haven’t
read any of these, but at least the Kate Bush one is probably fairly
interesting.
So, to sum up, if you have never
read Mysterious Skin or In Awe, and you’re someone who knows what it’s like to
feel like a marginalized person in our society and can relate to material like
this, I say get those books now!
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