In Awe

Rating:
Summary: UGH
Review: Just finished this. I agree with other reviewers that trying for the "artsy gold" was really just a pretensious attempt to be recognized as A Serious Artiste. Get over yourself. His first book at least held the reader's interest. I fear Mr. Heim is In Awe of himself.

Rating:
Summary: From Lambda Book Report, 6.03, October 1997
Review: My review is placed here courtesy of Lambda Book Report: One word for this book is uncanny. Readers of Scott Heim's debut novel, Mysterious Skin, will have some notion what to expect, but may be unprepared for how far Heim has pushed. He has produced a dense, unruly novel--nasty, frightening, but with a distinctive aspiration of spirit. Those who give themselves to it will be haunted. In Awe returns us to gay-resonant Kansas, with its expansive landscapes, terrifying storms, and threats of violence. Once again we experience this world through three misfits, though this time two of them are adult women, Harriet and Sarah. Their friend, gay teenager Boris, most resembles the characters of Mysterious Skin-until we come to see him as doppelganger of a fourth protagonist, Harriet's son and Sarah's soulmate, Marshall, whose death and funeral occur, offstage, between chapters 1 and 2. Marshall's strong presence in the novel is one of several ways that Heim earns the awe of his title. The central plot of In Awe involves the stalking of Sarah, Boris, and Harriet by homophobic locals. (In a sense, this novel expands to horrific proportions a single harassing encounter near the end of Mysterious Skin.) The stalking plot builds in complexity and creepiness until it culminates with a seven-page description of mangled bodies. But this is only the surface of what Heim has to reveal. His deeper topic is what Poe called the spirit of Perverseness: the longing of the soul to vex itself. So both Boris and Sarah become sexually fixated on their tormentors, and for each the awful climax answers desires that Heim has skillfully evoked. Along the way Heim perversely pushes the reader's limits: In Awe includes a four-year-old seducing his foster father, celebratory piss-drinking, and fellatio with a corpse. Thrusting human perversity at us, Heim can be as harsh, and as serious, as Dennis Cooper. The effect of Heim's prose, however, is very different from Cooper's. There's a verbal expansiveness here that brings out of this grim world something grand, uncanny, horrific and sweet simultaneously. Heim's term awe evokes the sublime as defined by Edmund Burke: "fitted to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, . . . conversant about terrible objects . . . productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling." (It's consistent with this idea that storms break out in this novel at moments of highest emotion.) In Mysterious Skin, strong impulses of perversity and yearning tended to separate into different characters; In Awe makes these inextricable. The awesome uncanny is manifested in a series of haunting but exhilarating moments. Some are bizarre, as when 62 year-old Harriet loses her grief in cheerleading for a pig race; others are wrenching, as when the dying Marshall, in a flashback, lifts his eye patch to share a wink with a young boy at a baseball game. Such moments stay with you: they are cruxes, not of plot but of the uncanny human spirit. Heim's style is an important factor in achieving his effects. One early review criticized In Awe for florid prose. "Pears rust on the branch. . . . And the cicadas, always the cicadas, groaning from elm bark and chimney-brick hideaways like martyrs, slowly burning." But I think this style is functional. Mysterious Skin was written in first person, while most of In Awe is third person. This enables the language to express states of consciousness beyond any character's articulation (a technique invented by the gay wizard Henry James.) Heim also sets up many resonances in language and imagery-for example, a turtledove that is transformed from a symbol of love to one of suffering. His skill with language is awe-aspiring. Read In Awe attentively, and you'll see

Rating:
Summary: From Lambda Book Report, 6.03, October 1997
Review: My review is placed here courtesy of Lambda Book Report:One word for this book is uncanny. Readers of Scott Heim's debut novel, Mysterious Skin, will have some notion what to expect, but may be unprepared for how far Heim has pushed. He has produced a dense, unruly novel--nasty, frightening, but with a distinctive aspiration of spirit. Those who give themselves to it will be haunted.In Awe returns us to gay-resonant Kansas, with its expansive landscapes, terrifying storms, and threats of violence. Once again we experience this world through three misfits, though this time two of them are adult women, Harriet and Sarah. Their friend, gay teenager Boris, most resembles the characters of Mysterious Skin-until we come to see him as doppelganger of a fourth protagonist, Harriet's son and Sarah's soulmate, Marshall, whose death and funeral occur, offstage, between chapters 1 and 2. Marshall's strong presence in the novel is one of several ways that Heim earns the awe of his title.The central plot of In Awe involves the stalking of Sarah, Boris, and Harriet by homophobic locals. (In a sense, this novel expands to horrific proportions a single harassing encounter near the end of Mysterious Skin.) The stalking plot builds in complexity and creepiness until it culminates with a seven-page description of mangled bodies. But this is only the surface of what Heim has to reveal. His deeper topic is what Poe called the spirit of Perverseness: the longing of the soul to vex itself. So both Boris and Sarah become sexually fixated on their tormentors, and for each the awful climax answers desires that Heim has skillfully evoked. Along the way Heim perversely pushes the reader's limits: In Awe includes a four-year-old seducing his foster father, celebratory piss-drinking, and fellatio with a corpse.Thrusting human perversity at us, Heim can be as harsh, and as serious, as Dennis Cooper. The effect of Heim's prose, however, is very different from Cooper's. There's a verbal expansiveness here that brings out of this grim world something grand, uncanny, horrific and sweet simultaneously. Heim's term awe evokes the sublime as defined by Edmund Burke: "fitted to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, . . . conversant about terrible objects . . . productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling." (It's consistent with this idea that storms break out in this novel at moments of highest emotion.) In Mysterious Skin, strong impulses of perversity and yearning tended to separate into different characters; In Awe makes these inextricable. The awesome uncanny is manifested in a series of haunting but exhilarating moments. Some are bizarre, as when 62 year-old Harriet loses her grief in cheerleading for a pig race; others are wrenching, as when the dying Marshall, in a flashback, lifts his eye patch to share a wink with a young boy at a baseball game. Such moments stay with you: they are cruxes, not of plot but of the uncanny human spirit.Heim's style is an important factor in achieving his effects. One early review criticized In Awe for florid prose. "Pears rust on the branch. . . . And the cicadas, always the cicadas, groaning from elm bark and chimney-brick hideaways like martyrs, slowly burning." But I think this style is functional. Mysterious Skin was written in first person, while most of In Awe is third person. This enables the language to express states of consciousness beyond any character's articulation (a technique invented by the gay wizard Henry James.) Heim also sets up many resonances in language and imagery-for example, a turtledove that is transformed from a symbol of love to one of suffering. His skill with language is awe-aspiring. Read In Awe attentively, and you'll see

Rating:
Summary: Awesome!
Review: One of the most affecting novels I've ever read. A combination multi-character study and suspense novel. Maybe even better than his first book

Rating:
Summary: Scott Heim's swan song?
Review: Personally I hope so. This is the most florid, overwrought piece of trailer trash fiction I've read in years. Lurid and ultimately silly. Heim seems to have lost touch with reality, replaced that with going for the artsy gold. Well, he missed by a mile. Ugh. Sad decline of a promising once young talent.

Rating:
Summary: Try again, Scott Heim
Review: Personally, I couldn't finish it. The prose had moments of beauty, but was mostly florid and overbaked. I don't mind unpleasantness in fiction, but how much is too much? I thought "Mysterious Skin" was intermittently great and full of potential -- let's hope this was a sophomore slump. I love to see a young gay writer putting out novels, especially ones set outside the NY-LA-SF triangle. I'm already looking forward to Scott Heim's next novel, and here's hoping it's a little more . . . down to earth.

Rating:
Summary: The only thrill with this book is throwing it away...
Review: Reading In Awe is an exercise is self-control. Too often I suffered through paragraphs that made me grit my teeth. They were full of pretentious writing, graphic detail that reminded me of splatterpunk, and characters I pretty much hated. Is this the new voice of... fiction? If so, I shall envy the deaf.

Rating:
Summary: Juvenile Pretensions Flatten Good Writing
Review: Scott Heim's writing is at times beautifully visual and graphic, and yet in this novel, the story is so preposterous his art is obscured. The characters all engage in completely ridiculous behavior that is meant to be read with grim shock and guilty, ghoulish pleasure, but which will make more discerning readers roll their eyes. This book also personifies the laughable trend in gay fiction: if there is death and depravity and self-loathing, then it's lit. If there is not, then it's not. The finale of this book is especially outrageous; you can feel Heim reaching for the most grotesque things possible in order to top himself. One part of the book I did love was the female character's past as one of those dirty little girls in class who doesn't even realize why she behaves the way she does. More character study on that line would have improved this book immeasurably.

Rating:
Summary: Amazing
Review: Scott Heims IN AWE is amazing book worth every minute of reading

Rating:
Summary: misunderstood
Review: Some of the reviews printed here miss the point. Seems like this book was meant to be more a novel just slightly out of the realm of reality than a true-to-life story--thats what makes it so powerful and creepy, as the characters are real but the situations are beyond belief, overly described, highly stylized, etc. Out of context some things here would seem unbelievable or overdone or just too horrible, but thats one of the many risks of the book, because within the context he makes it all work. Very scary and very sad, completely different than Mysterious Skin yet very obviously the same writer.