Rating: 
Summary: Skip this would-be Dennis Cooper
Review: It's obvious this guy wants to be edgy and literary but you read the first few chapters and there's no thrill. Pretty obvious why Heim has only two books out while Dennis Cooper has over ten. If you like your writing to have bite, skip Mysterious Skin.
Rating: 
Summary: Fresh, stylish, sexy telling of scary adolescent sexuality
Review: Mysterious Skin is a 90s sexual coming-of-age novel very creatively and wittily told from the point of view of several of the novel's characters, each encountering sexuality in a different way. It is highly imaginative in its images and method of storytelling and evokes the reader's own memories of sexuality awakened. It also explores the theme of the intimate relationships gay men often have with their straight women friends. It introduces three different gay adolescents who confront their sexuality very differently, thus avoiding obvious gay cliches and presenting a range of experiences each very interesting it its own way. The novel also deals with the imaginations of its characters is a delightful way. One of the best coming of age novels ever written
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Summary: A chilling but enthralling coming-of-age story
Review: Read this book if you want to be both shocked and delighted. Scott Heim crafts a careful book full of some of the unpleasantries in life but in a way that drives the reader through the book happily. I cannot recommend enough!
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Summary: Beauty At Its Most Anguished, Simplisticly Intricate
Review: Scott Heim is one of the best authors I've read in a long time. He is up on a pedestal with the likes of Truman Capote. His debut novel "Mysterious Skin" is about Neil and Brian, two gay boys, who through trials and tribulations, discover who they are, and what they are. There just aren't any adequate words in the human language to describe Scott Heim's beautiful, haunting prose. He is incredibly poetic, and the lives of Brian and Neil are so exqiusitely painful and achingly beautiful that it should drive you to tears, and if it doesn't, then check your chest cavity for a heart. How anyone could possibly give this book a bad review is simply beyond me. Just be forewarned: Do not read this book on a gray rainy day, while feeling dismal, or while using heavy machinery. It is sure to depress, but make angry, and also begs for attention.~Steven Harvey
Rating:
Summary: Beauty At Its Most Anguished, Simplisticly Intricate
Review: Scott Heim is one of the best authors I've read in a long time. He is up on a pedestal with the likes of Truman Capote. His debut novel "Mysterious Skin" is about Neil and Brian, two gay boys, who through trials and tribulations, discover who they are, and what they are. There just aren't any adequate words in the human language to describe Scott Heim's beautiful, haunting prose. He is incredibly poetic, and the lives of Brian and Neil are so exqiusitely painful and achingly beautiful that it should drive you to tears, and if it doesn't, then check your chest cavity for a heart. How anyone could possibly give this book a bad review is simply beyond me. Just be forewarned: Do not read this book on a gray rainy day, while feeling dismal, or while using heavy machinery. It is sure to depress, but make angry, and also begs for attention. ~Steven Harvey
Rating: 
Summary: You'll Never Eat Cereal the Same Way Again
Review: Scott Heim may be the cutting edge of a gay-themed 90s literary blossoming that found its budding promise in the 80s. In "Mysterious Skin" (1995) and "In Awe" (1997), Heim exorcizes a Gothic imagination more often expected in southern than midwestern literature. (A Chicago reviewer called him a Gen-X Faulkner). His poet's eye and ear for the glory of the ordinary peoples his Kansas with walking wounded, seemingly helpless and pitiful fringe elements of nowhere society to produce psychological thrillers that transform the landscape and transcend the commonness of his characters. His world is anything but ordinary, and his little misfits take on mythic proportions that would tantalize any Jungian analyst. So accomplished is his language and so disturbing his forays into the heart of darkness and obsession that The New York Times Magazine ranked him among thirty young artists most likely to change the culture for the next thirty years. In "Mysterious Skin," Brian Lackey can't remember a five-hour period when he was eight and his sister found him confused and bleeding under their house. At eighteen, Brian's amnesia obsession involves a theory of alien abduction fed by a sexually repressed true believer nearly twice his age, and a foggy link to a New York hustler, Neil McCormick, once the star of Brian's little league team and a notorious in-your-face homosexual tough determined to make his reputation equal that of his carousing mother's. The story is told by Brian, Neil, Wendy, and Eric (both school chums of Neil's) in alternating chapters. Quick paced, "Mysterious Skin" proves the connection between love and need, compulsion, and even sadomasochism--blurred until Brian and Neil's Christmas Eve epiphany in the home once owned by their coach. It's a tough novel that brings together rough trade with the tenderest moments of the heart. And you'll never eat cereal the same way again. Read "Mysterious Skin" and you will have to read "In Awe." If Scott Heim doesn't excite you, better check your pulse.
Rating:
Summary: Great!!!!
Review: Scott Heim's amazing first novel is one of the best books you'll read in your lifetime. A story that excites you, thrills you, enrages you and touches you. READ THIS BOOK!!!!!!
Rating:
Summary: Heim's Novel Stuns, Inspires
Review: Scott Heim's MYSTERIOUS SKIN is frightening, yet full of welcome and assurance. It is unusual, yet is set among fiercely American settings and traditions. It is particular and personal, yet resonates across universal themes of pain and redemption. Many authors flee in terror from the shadows, from controversial images and ideas. MYSTERIOUS SKIN is a brave novel and an honest novel. There are fewer than a dozen of these in American literature. Keen readers from other nations will cull from a large pile of books the few which stun them into attention and inspire them to self-knowledge. Scott Heim's two novels would be on any such list. Arresting and compassionate story-telling, and representative of the true vein of fiction in the United States.
Rating:
Summary: Heim's Novel Stuns, Inspires
Review: Scott Heim's MYSTERIOUS SKIN is frightening, yet full of welcome and assurance. It is unusual, yet is set among fiercely American settings and traditions. It is particular and personal, yet resonates across universal themes of pain and redemption. Many authors flee in terror from the shadows, from controversial images and ideas. MYSTERIOUS SKIN is a brave novel and an honest novel. There are fewer than a dozen of these in American literature. Keen readers from other nations will cull from a large pile of books the few which stun them into attention and inspire them to self-knowledge. Scott Heim's two novels would be on any such list. Arresting and compassionate story-telling, and representative of the true vein of fiction in the United States.
Rating:
Summary: Powerful and Mesmerizing
Review: Some books are made to affect the reader and make them feel emotions and make them disover worlds or situations they've never knew existed. Scott Heim's Mysterious Skin is a coming of age tale that holds nothing back. It's a fearless and unpretentious effort that will leave you breathless. The book's complex narrative takes us through the minds of various characters (the novel is told in first person, using different characters to tell different parts of the story). The story starts when Brian and Neil are young boys. Although they are on the same baseball team, they do not know each other. Something happens to them that will mark them forever. They both find different ways to deal with the event that left them mentally scarred. Many years later, Brian is certain that his blackouts and frequent nose bleeds can only be attributed to the fact that he was abducted by aliens. But as he grows older, the horrible truth slowly reveals itself to him and he quickly realizes that he needs to find Neil in order to put it all behind him. Neil, on his part, deals with his past in a very different way. Working as an escort, Neil doesn't always know what he wants. He is a very reluctant character in that he thinks he knows who he is what he wants when, in fact, he's a complete stranger to himself. The only way he can find to deal with everything life hands him is through his body and his sexuality. Offering very complex characters with even more complicated lives, Mysterious Skin is a powerful read that you won't be able to put down. The pain these characters feel just oozes off the page, affecting the reader in various ways. Just wait until Neil and Brian finally meet. Their confrontation is completely heartbreaking. It's almost impossible not to feel for these characters, almost impossible not to sympathize and empathize with them. Mysterious Skin was Scott Heim's first novel. I can't wait to discover more from this writer. Mysterious Skin really left an impression on me. Highly recommended.
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