Beautiful Children

One Saturday night in Las Vegas, twelve-year-old Newell Ewing goes out with a friend and doesnt come home. In the aftermath of his disappearance, his mother, Lorraine, makes daily pilgrimages to her sons room and tortures herself with memories. Equally distraught, the boys father, Lincoln, finds himself wanting to comfort his wife even as he yearns for solace, a loving touch, any kind of intimacy. As the Ewings navigate the mystery of whats become of their son, the circumstances surrounding Newells vanishing and other events on that same night reverberate through the lives of seemingly disconnected strangers: a comic book illustrator in town for a weekend of debauchery; a painfully shy and possibly disturbed young artist; a stripper who imagines moments from her life as if they were movie scenes; a bubbly teenage wiccan anarchist; a dangerous and scheming gutter punk; a band of misfit runaways. The people of Beautiful Children are urban nomads, each with a past to hide and a pain to nurture, every one of them searching for salvation and barreling toward destruction, weaving their way through a neon underworld of sex, drugs, and the spinning wheels of chance. In this masterly debut novel, Charles Bock mixes incandescent prose with devious humour to capture Las Vegas with unprecedented scope and nuance and to provide a glimpse into a microcosm of modern America. Beautiful Children is an odyssey of heartache and redemptionheralding the arrival of a major new writer.