Article: The nightmarish world of `Dream Boy'

DREAM BOY

By Jim Grimsley

Algonquin, 195 pp., $18.95

Nathan is a boy of secrets.

He can tell no one of the burgeoning love he shares with Roy, a high school senior. He cannot explain to classmates why his family has led such an itinerant life, moving from one small town to another. And most of all, Nathan cannot breathe a word, even to Roy, as to why he fears the smell of stale whiskey and the sound of his father's stagger up the stairs, inching closer and closer to Nathan's bedroom.

"Dream Boy," Jim Grimsley's understated, heartbreaking novel, is about the weight of secrets, the horror of incest and the fragility of first love. It is a grim yet luminous coming-of-age tale that ...

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