Execution, Texas: 1987

Scott's debut begins, rather impressively, as an MTV-era update of Edmund White's gay coming-of-age-novel, A Boy's Own Story. Unfortunately, after some dazzling initial character development and undeniably tuned-in generational reportage, Scott is forced to graft the inconveniences of plot onto a narrative that was doing fine without it. The result is a book that spends much of its final third wandering around in an effort to get finished. Stuck in the Texas town of the novel's title, 17-year-old Seeger King is almost sure he's queer, or at least bisexual. The son of permissive hippies, he and his sassy girlfriend, Cordelia, get off pretending that she's Edie Sedgwick and he's Andy Warhol, but they also spend some time getting off with each other. Together, they and their fellow Ecstasy-dropping young libertines defy high-school conformity and cut a swath through Dallas nightclubs. Bound for college in New York, Seeger meets Kent, a sexually cryptic sophomore wrestler with whom Seeger and Cordelia form a tense threesome, which one night inches into the realm of the physical. As Seeger tumbles rapidly in love with Kent, he frets that his feelings signal a betrayal of Cordelia. Scott's concluding revelation, however, brings Seeger around to a fundamental, if familiar, truth: the world is vaster than the town you grew up in, and often the key to adulthood is to leave old identities behind. (Nov.) FYI: Scott, whose stories have been published in literary magazines, is also a performance artist whose work consists of interdisciplinary performances.