Have You Seen Me? Katherine Scott Nelson; published by Chicago Center for Literature and Photography; 2011; Price: $20.00 (cotton sheets), $15.00 (recycled sheets), pay what you want (electronic).

Review by Kent McDaniel

Have You Seen Me? Tells the story of Chris, a gay teenage boy growing up in Springhill, Nebraska, a small town gone to seed. At summer’s start, the police come to question him about the disappearance of his best friend, Vyv, a Goth girl and a cutter who’s run away from home. 

He tells the cops he knows nothing about it, and he hopes they believe him. He has enough problems already: A gay teen in the rural Midwest, Chris also has unemployed parents, whose  unemployment checks are about to stop. His mother is managing to cope, but his father is clinically depressed and when not lying in bed, makes one birdhouse after another in the backyard. Chris’s grandfather, a WWII fighter pilot and Chris’s childhood hero, has developed dementia. Secretly Chris is exchanging emails with Vyv, using a computer at the town library. 

Chris lucks into a summer job with Albert, a stranger in Springhill, with whom Vyv had been intrigued. A loner, Albert has inherited a small farm. Working there not only gives Chris cash, it lets him discover that Albert is a back to nature anarchist and junk collector, who’s writing a book about his philosophy. Dolls heads and a gorilla mask are impaled on the fence posts around Albert’s place. Pit traps and snares lie all around the farm to ward off intruders. Albert hunts game with a homemade bow and arrow, dreams of bombing dams, and grows pot in the woods. 

If all of this sounds good, it is. But the novella Nelson weaves around it falls short of its potential.