The Scott Heim Occasion

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(l. to r.) Scott Heim, unknown

I've been friends with the writer Scott Heim for a very long time. We started corresponding when he was living in Lawrence, Kansas and was just beginning to write his now justly famous first novel Mysterious Skin. It was great to be able to share in his experience of writing the novel and then to observe both its triumph and Scott's pleasure at his achievement. By the same token, it was hard as Scott's friend and fan when his second novel In Awe was not so well received, an experience that discouraged him greatly and helped inspire a very long dry spell wherein he struggled to continue writing fiction and experienced a ton of self-doubt. It ended up being a long eleven years between In Awe and his new novel, We Disappear.  I know he's been working on the novel off and on during that entire eleven years. He'd occasionally tell me We Disappear was back on track, but the work always seemed to happen in fits and starts with lengthy periods when his silence told me that his writing troubles had returned.  I don't know for sure, but I think the success of Gregg Araki's very fine movie of Mysterious Skin, which brought a lot of new readers to the novel, must have really helped his confidence and reminded him of the importance of his fiction.  In any case, We Disappear is finally real, and I think it's the best thing Scott has ever written, and I want to celebrate this long awaited new triumph for him by giving the blog over to his book for the day.  Here's some information on We Disappear and Scott's earlier work, some related media and background, an excerpt from the novel, and an implicit high recommendation.

Trailer

Story

The body of a teenage boy is discovered in a Kansas field. The murder haunts Donna--a recent widow battling cancer--calling forth troubling details from long-suppressed memories of her past. Hoping to discover more about "disappeared" people, she turns to her son, Scott, who is fighting demons of his own. Addicted to methamphetamines and sleeping pills, Scott is barely holding on--though the chance to help his mother in her strange and desperate search holds out a slim promise of some small salvation. But what he finds is a boy named Otis handcuffed in a secret basement room, and the questions that arise seem too disturbing even to contemplate. With his mother's health rapidly deteriorating, he must surrender to his own obsession, and unravel Otis's unsettling connections to other missing teens . . . and, ultimately, to Scott himself.

Field trips

We Disappear

Scott Heim talks about We Disappear, 1,  2,  3

The We Disappear US book tour dates
Podcast: Bamboo Nation's interview with Scott Heim

Elsewhere

Scott Heim's favorite books, CDs, and etc. of 2007
Scott Heim's '17 Magnificent Post-Shoegaze Gems'
Scott Heim's blog
Scott Heim's shelf on LibraryThing
Scott Heim's MySpace page
Scott Heim Official Website

Earlier works

Scott Heim's second novel In Awe


Scott Heim's first novel Mysterious Skin


Mysterious Skin, the movie

Excerpt

My mother and I had been obsessed. Faces here one moment, gone the next: their pictures from the sides of buses, from highway posters, grainy gray on cartons of milk. She and I collected them, the boxes crammed with articles scissored from magazines, with ink-smudged newsprint photos. Sometimes we even wrote to the deserted ones, the innocents left behind by those who had vanished: the wives and husbands; the distraught, skin-pulling parents. We wanted to ache with them. We wanted to get as close as we could, to understand the victims gone “without a trace,” these souls for whom the earth seemed to yawn its bleak and blackened throat and swallow whole.
----Back, back, the autumn I turned ten. Three avenues away, in our flowerless, stone’s-throw of a town, a teenage boy disappeared. His name was Evan Carnaby: a thin, blond thing with duct-taped glasses and a cough like knocked knuckles who rode my afternoon bus, backseat always. My sister and I stared and stared, slinking low in our seats when he glared back. We loved the loop of baling twine he wore around his wrist; the ripped knees of his jeans, twin explosions of denim. We loved the loaded pockets of his shirts where he sometimes kept candy: cinnamon disks, butterscotch, anything else he could unwrap to spark our craving. And we loved his silly sing-alongs to the music played by Susie Mayhew, our driver in hoop earrings big as handcuffs and a red bandanna headscarf, driver whose tattooed husband drove a bus route, too. Susie liked rock-and-roll eight-track tapes on the rides after school—those windows-down trips home with sunflowers shaking in the ditches, each thunderstorm a doomy promise toward the north—and while the bus kids enjoyed the music, even anticipated rides home, no one seemed more engaged than Evan. He sang Elton John, sang Steely Dan, even sang, failed harmony, Simon and Garfunkel. From our seats, Alice and I crouched to listen as he belted them out: verse, chorus, chorus. God had tuned Evan’s vocal cords slightly flat, just slightly, but his fingers against his seatpads kept prudent, bafflingly apt rhythm. Evan.
----One day, seasons turning, he stopped riding the bus. His absence, at first, went unnoticed: he could have fallen ill, could have skipped a day. But four days passed, five, and on that following Monday we heard the news. This was 1976, when we still listened to the morning radio: novelty songs helping to wake us in the shower, the disc jockeys volleying their jokes. That morning, their tone went serious; they stopped the music for a special report. Evan’s mother, Nancy Carnaby, had somehow nudged her voice into our radio. We heard her crying against the staticky waves. I remember Alice’s eyes, the green gone from them; I remember my mother, egg yolk dripping from the whisk in her hand, as she cocked her head to hear. Evan had taken an early-evening ride on his bike. Evan had headed for nearby Scudder Creek, there to explore a section rumored glorious with bluegill and bass and sapphire-backed snapping turtles. Evan had never come home.
----“The world’s not right,” a teacher told my class that week, and we all believed her. “Don’t leave home. Never, ever get into a car if you don’t know the driver.” We’d heard this lesson time and time before but suddenly, dreadfully, those words carried an accompanying illustration. Bedtimes, I pictured Evan sliding into the backseat of a dark Cadillac. Imagined him squinting from behind his glasses; tugging the twine at his wrist. But I couldn’t imagine more. No gags or knives or nakedness, no degradation or annihilation. Back then, I was too young, too frail to see what could have transpired after that skidding bike, that sudden surprised cry.
----He had been so beautiful. The city paper printed his sixth-grade picture, awkwardly posed, taken three years earlier. The picture was positioned front page, adjacent to a snapshot of Evan’s cherry-red Schwinn, the bicycle he’d steered that evening toward Scudder Creek, bicycle now vanished as well. I remember squinting close at the bike, its particulars blurry within the newsprint, imagining his lanky ankles straining on its pedals; his white knuckles gripping ownership on its handlebars. Then I looked longer at twelve-year-old Evan and his lopsided grin. Here, the scar on his right cheekbone. Here, the teeth slightly big for his mouth. Evan was staring not at the polished O of the lens but higher, higher up, at the photographer’s face perhaps, his expression somehow making the picture sadder, crueler—as though the boy had seen, hovering in that shutter, something terrible that waited just three years ahead, terrible and glinting its opal curse, and just then had looked up, away from that future. “A screwed-up angel,” I would call him later, much later when my mother and I had tucked him away in our scrapbook with the other eventual children, women, and men. But at the time I had no language for what I felt when I looked at Evan’s picture. I only shuddered and stared and continued to ask my mother my daily questions: have the officers heard any news, have they found the Carnaby boy yet, do they think he could still be alive.
----For back then my mother, after all, was privileged. In those days, she kept a job as a dispatcher at the sheriff’s department in a neighboring city, and each night, around nine-thirty, Alice and I would linger at the kitchen table to wait for her return. Her job’s value, after Evan, had doubled. We became the insiders; we had advantage over our classmates, and they could come to us for the trickle of knowledge. As my mother untwisted her hair from its bun, as she unbuttoned her walnut-brown uniform, we waited to hear what leads the detectives had discovered. But in the following months, very little materialized. Two snapped bicycle spokes, which may or may not have been Evan’s, were found by the mail carrier on his Scudder Creek route. In a nearby ditch, a wrapper from Evan’s favorite brand of black licorice (sticky prints, however, proved from fingers not his).
----Nights, I imagined the pimples below his chin and between his eyebrows. Imagined his hair, hay-blond, oily, still tracked with lines from the drawn comb. The delicate silver chain with its featherweight cross at his throat. And Evan’s throat itself, bruised with kisses I couldn’t understand.
----The songs on the school bus weren’t the same anymore. Soon Susie Mayhew granted our requests for a new round of eight-track tapes. Some mornings, she idled before the graveled Carnaby driveway before realizing her mistake. My sister and I could see the space, near the front porch, where Evan once anchored his bike. The upstairs window, dust-colored curtains with blue sailboat print; the abandoned basketball net above the garage.
----After Christmas that year, an ice fisherman snagged a T-shirt from the creek where Evan had traveled, that evening, hunting turtles. The shirt was medium, the size he preferred; it was Fruit of the Loom, his brand. There were no bloodstains or bulletholes. His parents tacked more posters around town; they reappeared on the radio spots, the public television shows. Their temporal hope seemed now to have dissipated: tired crack in the voice; head lowering slowly from the camera.
----Ultimately all news on Evan shuttled away to silence. My sister, too, lost interest. But I did not, could not, quit. In velvety secret, my mother and I kept our makeshift shrine to him, to other vanished souls. Spring 1977, then summer, the days before my fifth grade year. A time of my parents’ divorce, the year I gained eighteen pounds, placed runner-up in a countywide spelling bee, began double-bolting the door of my room at night. Throughout these days, I thought of Evan. Alone against my pillow, I dreamed him in some heroic world, wandering, windy-haired, his eyes pale punch-outs of sky. Maybe, somewhere and someday, I would find him. I would present all the pictures I’d saved, all the newspaper tales I’d cut and kept in the tattered scrapbook below my bed. And Evan would take them and smile, he would even laugh his lopsided laugh, no longer vanished, now alive and delivered, dirty from midday wind and midnight rain, sleepy as a breather of poppies.