Mysterious Skin
by Scott Heim
Scott Heim arrives with torrential explosions of the pre-sweetened and pre-fab. His bracingly erotic short story "Imagining Linc," burst from the pages of last year's Waves anthology with a bright, sexual zest. The tale climaxed with two mid-western teenagers lustily tangled up in an igloo-shaped snow cone shop, splashing each other with bottles of sweet syrup. Now, in Mysterious Skin, Heim's provocative and daringly imagined first novel, a pivotal early scene finds a grown male Little League coach seducing eight-year-old Neil McCormick by showering him in a rain of Corn Pops, Cocoa Krispies, Froot Loops and Alpha-Bits before having his way with the boy on his linoleum kitchen floor.
These eye-popping images are captivating for their freshness and vivacity alone. But as one reads his way through Mysterious Skin one senses that Heim, still under 30, has greater game in mind. Set largely in small-town Kansas (where Heim grew up) the book traces the paths of Neil and ball-club teammate Brian Lackey from the time of their abuse at the coach's hands until their late adolescence when the young men both begin to rethink this pivotal early experience of their lives.
The bland, canned and artificial sweetness of a Sno-Cone or a commercial cereal is unfortunately akin to the simplistic, idealized images of heartland America—and of "recovery" from abuse—that we get in so many art and media presentations. Particularly in gay men's fiction, coastal urban centers are seen as the hub of complex lifestyles and complex psychology. Heim (who himself moved from Kansas to Manhattan for graduate work at Columbia) blasts apart such condescending mythology by presenting two middle-American characters who are every bit as complicated and—dare we apply the word to our nation's breadbasket?—just as neurotic as the boys of Venice and Chelsea.
Heim has Neil transform his childhood abuse into a romantic delusion featuring the coach as an idealized lover who can never be paralleled by any other man. Brian, conversely, represses his abuse almost absolutely; when memories begin to resurface, he twists them into a solemn belief that he was abducted by aliens as a boy.
The alien plotline is Heim's most audacious gambit. It is handled with aplomb. Without being too overt or simplistic in his comparisons, Heim invites the reader to play with metaphoric notions of "alienation" among all abused youngsters, among gays and among perpetrators of child abuse themselves.
The novel's chief weakness is Heim's use of multiple first-person narrators. There are "Neil" chapters and "Brian" chapters and chapters narrated by other, less central, characters, but while the changes in point of view are clear, the characters' vocabularies and tones of expression are largely indistinguishable.
Minor quibbles aside, Mysterious Skin is an especially noteworthy debut. Heim not only takes take an overdone subject and makes it new, but also brings his keen insight to underexplored settings.
