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Whistle Stopper - We Disappear: A Novel (P.S.)
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List Price: $13.95
Our Price: $7.10
Your Save: $ 6.85 ( 49% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Harper Perennial
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Average Customer Rating: 
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780061468971
ISBN: 0061468975
Label: Harper Perennial
Manufacturer: Harper Perennial
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 320
Publication Date: 2008-03-01
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Release Date: 2008-02-26
Studio: Harper Perennial
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Heim's best book yet
Comment: The magic of this book is how its narrative style reflects its characters and plot. The rich detail of the prose perfectly reflects the overtly detailed stories that the characters fabricate to make the "disappeared" children more real to them. Even as they are losing grip on reality and themselves, this lush description and storytelling spins a fascinating yarn that weaves it all together. Drugs, death and delusion only add to the disorienting but beautiful surreality that propels the characters and the reader to keep going. And even as lives and lines blur so that no one knows what the truth is, the writing is crisp and the characters are distinct. I had hoped for a more complete resolution, but I am sure the characters did as well. Sometimes we have all we can do to pack our lives full of detail and meaning to keep from disappearing ourselves.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A Commentary for We Disappear
Comment: The words "brave, honest, uncompromising, intimate, sincere, and uncomfortable" all come to mind when I think of Heim's work, and those words of course apply here with his latest novel, We Disappear.
With We Disappear, Heim delves further into themes which lay at the heart of his previous work: loss of innocence and the search for identity. Whereas Brian Lackey of Mysterious Skin struggled to discover the true meaning behind repressed childhood memories of abuse, Donna of We Disappear fights a battle against cancer while she attempts to piece together disjointed memories of being kidnapped at a young age. Of course, both Mysterious Skin and We Disappear are multi-tiered, with many narrative branches that cross and overlap, forming many layers. Mysterious Skin wasn't solely about Brain's search for answers, and that is the case here as well with Donna. Answers aren't always clear, and they usually don't come in the concise and defined form that we expect them to.
As far as layers go, I think that We Disappear may indeed be Heim's most intricate and complicated work to date. Yes, Donna is searching for answers about her past- and over the course of the novel, she and her son, Scott, investigate many cases which concern missing children. A boy named Otis appears to be a mystery unto his own self. Once the reader starts to peel away these layers however, one soon comes to understand that Warren isn't really the person at the heart of Donna's search. It's someone much closer to her, someone who doesn't even realize that he himself has disappeared.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A great book
Comment: 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 with desperation, an area where Heim is masterly- as we know from Mysterious Skin. A man who is desperately using drugs to keep his life on an even keel, and to avoid the black pit of depression; a dying woman who desperately clings to an obsession to keep herself alive. It is about how we carry impressions and hazy memories of early childhood incidents with us all our lives, and how they shape our lives without our even being aware of it. We Disappear is universal: although it is set in rural Kansas, it is no mere piece of Americana. I have never been to Kansas (except via The Wizard of Oz) but I related to these people. I know them. Don't we all have parents who are intimately familiar, and at the same time alien?
We also know from Mysterious Skin that Heim knows how to structure a story, and round off a narrative so the reader never feels cheated at the end. He is a writer with skill and heart. Maybe the subject matter of Mysterious Skin obscured the latter quality for some people, but that won't be the case with this novel. It is the best work about losing a parent I have read since the equally engrossing but entirely different novel by the Australian Patrick White, "The Eye of the Storm".
Customer Rating:
Summary: Powerful and heartfelt
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Brilliance
Comment: This novel, the third from Scott Heim, is expertly crafted and emotionally wrenching. It follows Scott, a meth-addicted freelance writer of textbooks, his mother Donna, dying from lymphoma and Dolores, a cancer survivor and Donna's "best friend in the whole world."
The other reviews go into detail regarding the plot of the novel, so I won't go into that here. I will only say that Mr. Heim's prose is brilliantly conceived, his characters real and affecting, the dialogue crisp and sure and the overall tone and mood of the book sure to hook the reader and provide a profound emotional experience.
Mr. Heim has always written beautiful prose to his disturbing, thought-provoking novels. With WE DISAPPEAR, he has taken his writing to a new level, providing deep, rich layers of characterization and plot and placing them into a very real-world context that is impossible to shrug off. This is, without a doubt, his most accessible novel to date and I hope with the very deepest of sincerity that he will continue to write, publish and gift the world with his imagination. There is a reason why Scott Heim is one of my favorite authors. He consistently gives his readers intelligent, real characters, and is never afraid to let them be who they are, regardless of how difficult it might be to stay with them. That honesty, that fearlessness, makes Mr. Heim a truly GREAT and gifted author.
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Editorial Reviews:
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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.
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