We Disappear: A Haunting Kansas Mystery of Missing Children, Meth Addiction, and Mothers and Sons (P.S.)($11.98Value)

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“ 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. In his psychologically disturbing third novel, Heim again focuses his obsidian vision on the relentlessly bleak Kansas prairie, where for years children have been disappearing with even greater frequency than they do from New York’s Grand Central Station. It’s a maniacal source of fascination for recently widowed, disease-ravaged Donna, who has created a shrine to the missing children, papering her home and truck with their images, filling scrapbooks with their newspaper clippings. When the corpse of the latest missing teenager is discovered, Donna summons her son Scott home from Manhattan to help her unravel the circumstances of the boy’s disappearance. Arriving to find his mother losing her battle with cancer, Scott, a gay crystal-meth addict, soon realizes that the only thing keeping his mother alive is her obsession—one, she reveals, that began with her own abduction as a child. As Scott gets drawn deeper into his mother’s fixation, the lines between reality and delusion become suspiciously and dangerously obscured. --Carol Haggas “Strange and luminous, this fascinating thriller tackles questions of identity, illness, and trauma….Taut and beautifully clear, the writing at times recalls that of Paul Auster.” - Publishers Weekly “ We Disappear is a more mature, subtle creation, ambitious in every thread it weaves.” - Portland Mercury “ We Disappear is really about identity and personality, about our constant struggle to know who we are, and about how easy it can be to lose our grip on reality when we try to alter our memories. ” - San Francisco Chronicle “ We Disappear is a mystery concerning the identity of a teenage boy and the people he draws into his web of half-truths. . . . As always, the care Heim takes with language elevates his material above the tawdry and closer to the sublime. . . . 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 “Scott Heim has taken contemporary gay literature to new highs. His follow-up to Mysterious Skin is an equally dark and disturbing tale of innocence lost. . . One part mystery, three parts character study, We Disappear will keep you guessing until its shocking conclusion.” - Zink Magazine “A haunting and heartbreaking read.” - V Magazine “Stripped of overt gay sexuality but brimming with seductive prose, We Disappear is a wonderfully strange and compelling novel that ought to appeal to straight and gay readers alike.” - CAMP Magazine “Suspenseful . . . We Disappear  is honest, and thus more troubling, for it reflects the stark knowledge that truth is only an amalgam of experience, a collection of individual shards that don’t coalesce into a pleasing whole. As Heim suggests, the search for truth invites the Hansels and Gretels of the world to follow the wrong adult home, the Alices to peer down the rabbit hole—and fantasy to cover up the nasty grime of reality.” - Los Angeles Times Book Review 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 connec