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Title: Mysterious Skin
Author: Scottt Heim
Published: New York: HarperCollins, 1995
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 292
Total Page Count: 103,634
Text Number: 298
Read Because: interested in the film (but I haven't seen it yet), book mentioned somewhere on Tumblr, borrowed from the Corvallis library
Review: Brian Lackey is an awkward, gawky kid obsessed with UFOs and alien abduction, trying to explain five hours of missing childhood memories. Neil McCormick's hypersexuality and attraction to older men stems from the vividly-remembered, idealized sexual abuse he experienced as a child. A story of the personal, private consequences of trauma, Mysterious Skin is one hell of a book, written with challenging, quiet ambiguity. The characters are dirty and flawed, but presented with such authenticity that it's impossible not to care for them, and the setting is similarly unglamorous; the plot is simultaneously mundane and compelling, and always overshadowed by a sense of inevitability no matter dark and strange its content becomes. This is in no way a criticism, because what happens is only half the story: Mysterious Skin is as about the relationship between an event and what it means to us, what it becomes to us, how it changes us—and in its mundanity and vastness, its strangeness and inevitability, its event and impact, it's the relationship between the halves that create a compelling and meaningful whole.
As such, Mysterious Skin is no tearjerker, despite appearances to the contrary. It's as much about the mundane fallout as the cataclysmic event and it's handled with intense and discomforting ambiguity, denying sensationalism and the comfort of cheap catharsis, providing instead the personal, imperfect, private truths of two individuals effected by child sexual abuse. Such ambiguity is demanding and Mysterious Skin offers no easy relief. It's a painful, difficult book—and a good one. On an artistic level, the text doesn't quite sing from the page—each narrator has a near-identical voice, despite their number and variety; otherwise, the prose is nearly transparent, the themes are handled with a slightly heavy hand, and the plot's inevitability can become too obvious. Those issues matter, but they're minor quibbles as the rest of what Mysterious Skin offers is enough to outweigh them. It's hard to call this a book I "enjoyed," but it's one I appreciated and my opinion of it only improves in retrospect; I hope to revisit, someday. And I recommend it.
Review posted here on Amazon.com.
Author: Scottt Heim
Published: New York: HarperCollins, 1995
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 292
Total Page Count: 103,634
Text Number: 298
Read Because: interested in the film (but I haven't seen it yet), book mentioned somewhere on Tumblr, borrowed from the Corvallis library
Review: Brian Lackey is an awkward, gawky kid obsessed with UFOs and alien abduction, trying to explain five hours of missing childhood memories. Neil McCormick's hypersexuality and attraction to older men stems from the vividly-remembered, idealized sexual abuse he experienced as a child. A story of the personal, private consequences of trauma, Mysterious Skin is one hell of a book, written with challenging, quiet ambiguity. The characters are dirty and flawed, but presented with such authenticity that it's impossible not to care for them, and the setting is similarly unglamorous; the plot is simultaneously mundane and compelling, and always overshadowed by a sense of inevitability no matter dark and strange its content becomes. This is in no way a criticism, because what happens is only half the story: Mysterious Skin is as about the relationship between an event and what it means to us, what it becomes to us, how it changes us—and in its mundanity and vastness, its strangeness and inevitability, its event and impact, it's the relationship between the halves that create a compelling and meaningful whole.
As such, Mysterious Skin is no tearjerker, despite appearances to the contrary. It's as much about the mundane fallout as the cataclysmic event and it's handled with intense and discomforting ambiguity, denying sensationalism and the comfort of cheap catharsis, providing instead the personal, imperfect, private truths of two individuals effected by child sexual abuse. Such ambiguity is demanding and Mysterious Skin offers no easy relief. It's a painful, difficult book—and a good one. On an artistic level, the text doesn't quite sing from the page—each narrator has a near-identical voice, despite their number and variety; otherwise, the prose is nearly transparent, the themes are handled with a slightly heavy hand, and the plot's inevitability can become too obvious. Those issues matter, but they're minor quibbles as the rest of what Mysterious Skin offers is enough to outweigh them. It's hard to call this a book I "enjoyed," but it's one I appreciated and my opinion of it only improves in retrospect; I hope to revisit, someday. And I recommend it.
Review posted here on Amazon.com.
