In Awe

As a fan of horror movies and overall 'eerie-ness' I thoroughly enjoyed Heim's second novel (after the also recommended MYSTERIOUS SKIN). IN AWE is certainly one of the most original, poetic, amd menacing gay novels outside of Dennis Cooper's work in recent memory. It's a moody and atmospheric horror movie with deep literary significance (Imagine a Gen-X Faulkner on acid writing a horror novel - and toss in equal parts Shirley Jackson, Dennis Cooper, and David Lynch). This meticulously crafted novel follows a season in the STRANGE lives of 3 Lawrence Kansas misfits. The completely absorbing and slightly surreal plot defies succinct description but includes mutilated mannequins, a vile of urine, and numerous other surprises. Suffice it to saw IN AWE is one hell of a ride. Demented, evocative, descriptive, deeply profound, and not recommended for the squeamish...big ole GORE ALERT...and I'm not talking former VP Al or his wife Tipper. The characters were a bit tough for me to get a handle on...but the strongest presence in this novel is that overall menacing mood and that holds it all together.

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.

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 huma

I was at Border's looking for a book to keep my company while I was grounded, and i picked this up. I was expecting another stupid, trashy suspense novel, and I was wrong. I read it in 2 days. (Couldn't put it down) The characters in this are so interesting, and Scott Heim makes you feel happy, sad, scared, and many other emotions at the same time. The ending was so shocking that i had to pinch myself to see if I was dreaming. I definitely recommend this book to anyone that wants an interesting, scary, funny, riveting, and engrossing read

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