MYSTERIOUS SKIN

After reading Heim's amazing fictional debut (he is also the author of Saved from Drowning, a poetry collection) only one question remains: How will he ever top this? In a small Kansas town in 1981, a Little League coach is sexually abusing his young charges. His favored target and star player is Neil McCormick, a tough little kid who at eight has already begun thumbing through his mother's Playgirls and believes that his relationship with the coach is true love. At the same time, Brian Lackey is found one day inside the crawl space under his family's house with a nosebleed and no memory of the preceding five hours. The two boys then take vastly different paths. Neil becomes a small-time hustler and petty thief, while Brian, a withdrawn boy with a strong interest in UFOs, comes to believe that the blank spot in his memory results from having been abducted by aliens. Heim rescues this from being a simple story of A versus B by telling it through different voices, so that Brian himself tells how he is chased from a church-sponsored haunted house by some former Little League pals who harass him, but it is his older sister who in one brief chapter explains how solitary he is and how he receives cruel phone calls from other kids. Heim is truly a master of creating different cadences and personalities while still maintaining just the right amount of consistency. He also has created fully believable, troubling human characters. One Halloween, Neil and his best friend, Wendy Peterson, kidnap a marginally retarded boy and set off bottle rockets by having the boy hold them in his mouth and then lighting them. When he's injured and they are afraid he'll tell on them, Neil quickly soothes him the only way he knows how, with oral sex. This is a disturbing book in many ways, but a worthwhile one, and even better, an exquisitely written one. As searing and unforgettable as an electric shock.