~ finding the right voice ~
Opening in a small town in Kansas in 1981 - and at a seemingly innocent Little League baseball game - this haunting debut novel explores the ways people choose to interpret memory. At the age of eight Brian Lackey is found bleeding under the crawl space of his house, having endured something so traumatic that he cannot remember an entire five-hour period of time. During the following years he begins to recall details of that night, but these fragments of memory are not enough to explain what happened to him. When he meets a woman who claims to have been abducted by a UFO he begins to believe that he, too, has been the victim of an alien encounter. Neil McCormick is fully aware of the events of that summer of 1981. Wise beyond his years, curious about his developing sexuality, Neil found what he perceived to be love and guidance from his baseball coach. Now, ten years later, he has become the town's pariah: a teenage hustler, a terrorist of sorts, unaware of the dangerous path his life is taking. His recklessness is governed by idealized memories of his coach, memories that unexpectedly change when Brian, searching for the missing time in his past, comes to Neil for help and, ultimately, the truth. Strange, beautiful, and of enormous imaginative scope, Mysterious Skin is about forgetfulness and loss, love and desire, danger and risk, and the ways we struggle to form an identity in a world that is often alien to us.