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Scott Heim's disorienting novel begins with ambitions limited, the case for drama strongly understated as wayward son returns to his Midwest home. But eventually, as we lose our trust in the narrator and the semi-disturbing "Kinko-the-kid-loving-clown" evocations reach a peak, the reader is dislodged from a place of certainty, or really any particular viewpoint. We inhabit the crazy drug-addled world fully. Although the occasional flat-footed dialogue mars this effort to mine the bends of disturbed minds unmoored by time or facts, these minor failures stand in stout in contrast to the poetic power of Heim's descriptions: a farmer's shirt smells of "popcorn" and the air in his mother's bedroom smells of dried apple and a young boy too like the narrator has "hit, criminal breath." The clutter in the narrator's mother's home not only set my teeth on edge; it also cluttered my mind and gave me a nervous, meth-like edge as I read. Heim's talent in this regard makes the effort to survive the loss of a narrator's trust entirely worth it, and the creepy brilliance of his descriptions make me eager for the next effort.
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.
