Rating: 
Summary: An intense story of two damaged souls
Review: "Mysterious Skin" is Scott Heim's first novel and it is a powerful book that really moved me. This novel is about two damaged souls, Neil and Brian, who were sexual abused as children by their baseball coach. Heim tells this disturbing narration through various points of view. Throughout the book we follow the reprecussions of their abuse, and the psychological harm it has done to these two young men. Brian, once the abuse is over, believes that he has been abducted by aliens and spends part of the novel searching for the missing piece of time in his childhood. And then we have Neil, who also falls victim to the coach, but he believes the abuse was a sign of love, not a violation. Neil becomes the town's rock and roll queer who starts hustling at, of all places, the baseball field. As the novel progress we see Neil's preoccupation with hustling and Brian's obession with aliens. These preoccupations end with a brutal rape of Neil by a psychotic john, and for Brian a derailed sexual encounter with a repressed older woman who believes she too was abducted. Neil and Brian finally meet and the sad truth comes to the surface. Through both their troubled and unhappy pasts, and by exposing the horrific events of it, perhaps Neil and Brian are finally released for their misguidedness. Heim's style is fresh, and the book keeps the reader absorbed in the story. In seceral ways I really didn't want this story to end. I could have read another two hundred pages. To put it simply: It really touched me. A must read for everyone!!!!
Rating:
Summary: A brilliant debut
Review: "Mysterious Skin" is a brilliantly disturbing and daring look at sexual abuse, sexuality and the way the two are connected. Moreover, it's from the differing perspectives of two boys growing up in the Middle West, and that fully-realized environment plays a large role as well, especially in regard to family (or lack thereof) and society. Heim locates our queer psychologies with a lyrical gift and a beguiling narrative structure. While it drags a bit in the early middle -- too much time is spent, I feel, on Brian's alien abduction obsession -- Heim is too good a writer to let this go on for long as the latter half of the novel rushes toward a harrowing and emotionally complex end. It's a beautifully rendered search for truths; while I've not read this in years, it really stuck with me.
Rating:
Summary: WHAT AN AMAZING NOVEL!!
Review: A friend recommended this to me. After chapter one I thought it was good but not that different from other coming of age novels. Boy was I wrong. After chapter two it's like a punch in the stomach--dark, sad and brutal but also full of really great writing and a lot of poetic details. There are terrific characters besides just the main 2 characters, including really well-drawn women and girls. IN the book is a scene involving a retarded boy and firecrackers that's so strange and sad and unforgetable. There's also stuff about UFOs which instead of distracting wind up completely making sense in the plot. I feel like fans of Kirsty Gunn, Chuck Palaniuk, JT Leroy, ect. would all like this book a lot. The writer has elements of those authors but also seems unique and talented in a totally different way.
Rating: 
Summary: Overly wrought attempt at literary fiction
Review: At best this is a distracting work though the author wants us to sympathize with characters that are pretty much contemptable and ugly on the inside and out. I really did not care what happened to any of them, which is unfortunate because some of the prose was good. The attempt to mix science fiction (alien abduction? please... it was trite) with the storyline failed miserably. He would have been better off with magic realism. At the very ending is abrupt and confusing. Pass this one buy unless you like reading fiction based on tabloids.
Rating:
Summary: Clean-cut and Tantalizing
Review: Heim was extraordinary with his work in the novel. The depiction of the characters and the setup itself allowed various voices to emerge and broadcast their perspective of events in this rupturing novel. Some situations may assume outlandish at best, but the reader would be captivated by the candor Heim exhibits. -- Frank Thorne
Rating:
Summary: A complex dazzling debut
Review: Heim write with such visual power. His narration is complex with a lot of point of view. I really enjoy this book...
Rating:
Summary: What a waste of time! Terrible!
Review: I can't believe that I purchased this book! I hated it! I first heard about it at a bookstore and someone would say I'd love it but all it was about was being sexually abused and liking it. After reading I felt like I had to puke and so I did. I don't know why this book was published! It had no point! And the gay hustling scenes disgusted me! ... It was a waste of time!
Rating:
Summary: Literature at its most beautiful
Review: I don't know what made me want to read Scott Heim's "Mysterious Skin." I don't know if it was the strange cover art, or the promising synopsis, or the fact that I knew it involved homosexuality. But whatever it was that drew me in, I'm extremely grateful for it. "Mysterious Skin" involves two seemingly unrelated plots: one about Brian, a boy who can't remember a five-hour period of his life; and the other about Neil, a boy who realized at a very young age his attraction to other men and took advantage of it when his Little League coach stole his sexual innocence. Brian grows up gradually remembering bits and pieces of the night he awoke in his crawlspace dirty and bleeding, and even begins to suspect that he was the victim of an alien abduction. Neil grows up to be a teenage hustler, cruising parks and gay bars for older men to scam, never able to push away his desire for more mature lovers after the incidents with his coach. The two stories flow separately through most of the book and come together toward the end. The combined tale that they tell is both heartbreakingly poignant and downright disturbing. The author walks on extremely dangerous ground throughout most of "Mysterious Skin." He deals with difficult and controversial material, especially in the beginning. The scenes he writes are graphic, and it would be very easy to toss the book aside out of disgust. But these scenes are necessary, and the author knows it. The graphically described scenes of sexual relations are necessary to make us feel for the characters and to understand them. What could easily be trashy becomes beautiful when you realize why it is there. "Mysterious Skin" is an emotion-filled, poignant work. It had a sort of power over me to make me care for the characters it introduced, and still does have that power as I find myself thinking about Neil and Brian every so often... as if they were my friends. And that is a remarkable accomplishment.
Rating:
Summary: Literature at its most beautiful
Review: I don't know what made me want to read Scott Heim's "Mysterious Skin." I don't know if it was the strange cover art, or the promising synopsis, or the fact that I knew it involved homosexuality. But whatever it was that drew me in, I'm extremely grateful for it. "Mysterious Skin" involves two seemingly unrelated plots: one about Brian, a boy who can't remember a five-hour period of his life; and the other about Neil, a boy who realized at a very young age his attraction to other men and took advantage of it when his Little League coach stole his sexual innocence. Brian grows up gradually remembering bits and pieces of the night he awoke in his crawlspace dirty and bleeding, and even begins to suspect that he was the victim of an alien abduction. Neil grows up to be a teenage hustler, cruising parks and gay bars for older men to scam, never able to push away his desire for more mature lovers after the incidents with his coach. The two stories flow separately through most of the book and come together toward the end. The combined tale that they tell is both heartbreakingly poignant and downright disturbing. The author walks on extremely dangerous ground throughout most of "Mysterious Skin." He deals with difficult and controversial material, especially in the beginning. The scenes he writes are graphic, and it would be very easy to toss the book aside out of disgust. But these scenes are necessary, and the author knows it. The graphically described scenes of sexual relations are necessary to make us feel for the characters and to understand them. What could easily be trashy becomes beautiful when you realize why it is there. "Mysterious Skin" is an emotion-filled, poignant work. It had a sort of power over me to make me care for the characters it introduced, and still does have that power as I find myself thinking about Neil and Brian every so often... as if they were my friends. And that is a remarkable accomplishment.
Rating:
Summary: Fantastic Novel, Great Characters
Review: I found this to be an awesome novel that explored serious issues in an honest, forthright way. Rather than being sad and depressing, I found the book quite fulfilling and uplifting. It is beautifully written, and the characters are wrestling with serious but neither uncomon nor unsurmountable sexual experiences. Congratulations to Scott Heim, an exceptionaly talented writer who is willing to earnestly explore the impacts of childhood sexual experiences in an honest fashion rather than the typical politically correct, "shocked and horrified" perspective.
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