We Disappear
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Book Overview
"We Disappear is a mystery concerning the identity of a teenage boy and the people he draws into his web of half-truths. . . . It's not hyperbole to suggest that We Disappear is the eeriest Kansas-set story since Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. -- Chicago Sun-Times
A dark and compelling novel of addiction, obsession, love, and family from the acclaimed author of Mysterious Skin
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, Scott must surrender to his own obsession, and unravel Otis's unsettling connections to other missing teens . . . and, ultimately, to himself.
Customer Reviews
Rated 3 starsIt was ok
It was nothing to write home about. The characters weren't very likeable so it was difficult to finish. I especially hated the mother. The plot was interesting enough, it was hard to predict the twists, which is why I gave the 3/5. (Tw for pedophilia)
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Rated 5 starsA great book
WE DISAPPEAR is a great book. If "gay writing" has a future, then We Disappear is the prototype: because Heim presents us with a fully formed, layered character whose sexuality defines who he is, but it is not the issue. That Scott is gay is just a given (the author has named the character after himself), as far as he and the other characters are concerned. Isn't this the world we hope to create some day? The novel deals...
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Rated 5 starsPowerful and heartfelt
Heim's done it again with We Disappear, only this may be his best effort yet. In this genre-busting novel, Heim explores many of the themes he's dealt with in past books such as Mysterious Skin and In Awe, only this time the eerieness has an all too human tinge. A great book.
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Rated 5 stars"Uncertain truths and partial, interchangeable lies"
In this exquisite rendering of a mother-son relationship, author Scott Heim moves his story from New York to Hutchinson, Kansas, and in the process, creates a vivid and convincing world, an emotional landscape that is both beautiful and also nightmarish as it recounts a son's battle with methamphetamines and a mother's battle with cancer. Living a drug-fuelled and depressed existence in New York, and working as a freelance...
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Rated 5 starsGhosts of Eternal Silence
For a mother and son, Donna and Scott's relationship is extremely close, almost too close, and from a certain angle WE DISAPPEAR plays like a Midwestern version of an early Cocteau novella, for Heim is good at the suffocating tension that grips them both in the same strangler's noose, as well as the loneliness they dominates their lives. (I suppose that's why Scott has no friends or ties--except for Gavin his drug dealer...
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