Tony Peregrin

In his debut work, "Angelhead: My Brother's Descent into Madness," Greg Bottoms holds schizophrenia up to light as if it were a prism, and describes how the illness distorts and colors the lives viewed through it.

Told in a jarring, matter-of-fact voice, the author tiptoes though the emotional minefield of his 1980's youth to reveal a middle-class family tortured by his older brother's rapidly fragmenting mind. In fact, the Bottoms clan routinely sleeps with their bedroom doors locked in order to protect themselves from Michael, whose nights are dominated by fits of venomous rage and visions of God.

Trotting out a dysfunctional childhood and crazy siblings for contemporary readers to ooh and aah over, like an adult version of show-and-tell, is anything but new. However, Bottoms' narrative manages to explore new terrain by offering an adolescent male point of view, one complicated by the thorny, competitive relationship that exist between brothers. The book is powered by the author's internal struggle: He seeks his older brother's approval, but is simultaneously embarrassed and even terrified of him.

Evidence of this struggle appears on virtually every page of "Angelhead," but one of the more disturbing examples unfolds when Michael's three pet snakes turn up missing. The family is in a panic to locate the creatures because of their soothing affect on Michael, who routinely allows them to crawl all over his naked body. The next morning, as Greg opens his underwear drawer, a squirming pile of the snakes startles him.

"I called Michael an asshole, told him to take them away," writes Bottoms. "My father, dressed for work, stood in the doorway, not wanting to be bothered by our fighting. All right you guys, my father said, I'm getting really sick of this."

"When my father left, Michael leaned over me, whispered in my ear: it's good to have snakes in your room when you sleep. They absorb your pain while you dream. I could smell his rotten smoke breath. Get out, I said. I love you, he said." In the book, Bottoms expresses hope that he will "save" himself with a story. "I realized that books made sense of the worst things, even if they seemed stunted and dark, offering nothing but a crippled epiphany," explains the author, whose purpose in writing what he calls a work of creative nonfiction is to save himself from the recurring feelings of shame and disgust he has for his older brother. But by the end of the book, the reader isn't quite convinced that writing "Angelhead" has saved the author from those lingering, prickly emotions. If "Angelhead" saves anyone, it's the reader, who is spared reading another book littered with well-worn cliches so common to this genre.

"Angelhead: My Brother's Descent into Madness"
by Greg Bottoms
Crown, 208 pages, $20

(2000-12-14)

Also by Tony Peregrin

GOLDEN NUGGET
No matter where the stories in Thisbe Nissen's "Out of the Girls' Room and Into the Night" take the reader -- from Grateful Dead shows to sick rooms to bright Manhattan vestibules -- the air is always moist with hidden, steamy desire, as if desire itself were an unnamed character lurking in each of the collection's scenes.
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Rice's cult of fans will pierce their fangs into this novel and be fed with a dark, haunting tale; coursing with gorgeous metaphors, well-researched details and a plot line full of juicy surprises.
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With panel discussions featuring titles such as "He Would Call Me His Chick as if He Was Talking to a Girl or Something" and "Show Me Your Genitals and I Will Tell You Who You Are: Hermaphroditism in Argentina 1880-1930," you quickly realize that this history conference will tackle subjects never mentioned in your high school--or even college--history text books.
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MANIFEST "DENSITY"
Rice has a great feel for the sights and sounds of high-school life--when he isn't tripping over himself to address the book's enormous array of issues; and because this is one of the rare gay coming-of-age works where the gay guy actually gets the (straight) guy!
(2000-09-21)

TRUTH ACHE
(2000-08-24)

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