Film gets into this novelist's 'Skin'

Most writers are delighted when their novels are sold to the movies, but the glow usually fades when they see the liberties directors almost always take with their stories.

It didn't happen that way for 38-year-old Boston novelist Scott Heim. The film version of his 1995 novel, ''Mysterious Skin," that opened Friday at the Kendall Square Cinema in Cambridge is truer to the book than his own earlier screenplay. And, best of all, it cured his six-year writer's block.

''Mysterious Skin" is set in a small Kansas town, like the one where Heim grew up. It tells of an 8-year-old boy found injured and bleeding under a house, with no memory of what had happened to him. Years later, he begins to think he must have been abducted by aliens, and still later he seeks the truth from a reckless young local hustler who may have knowledge of what really happened.

''It did really well and got a lot of publicity," Heim said in an interview. The New York Times Magazine included him on a list of 30 writers under 30 to watch, and he was photographed in Interview magazine in his New York apartment dressed only in socks and underwear.

''They hoped I would be the next big thing," he said of his publisher, HarperCollins, and he hoped so too. ''It's rare for a first-time author to go through that kind of publicity blitz. I guess I expected the same thing with the second book, but it was a more difficult book and didn't sell well."

The book was ''In Awe," published in 1997. Around that time, HarperCollins, part of the Rupert Murdoch empire, went through a reorganization, cut costs, and lost interest in a lot of previously nurtured writers. Then Heim's editor, Robert Jones, died.

''In the space of 3 1/2 years," Heim said, ''I had a book that tanked, my editor died, and my mom's health was declining. My first book had been optioned for a movie, but the deal fell through." He submitted early pages of a third novel to HarperCollins but was briskly turned down.

In 1995, Heim had met writer Michael Lowenthal at OutWrite, a gay writers' conference. They were on and off as a couple over the years, though, Heim says, ''mostly on." In 1998, Heim spent four months in London on an International Writer in Residence Fellowship, given by the London Arts Board. London was a kick, he says, but returning to New York without a job proved to be a hard reentry.

''I hadn't much money and was disillusioned about writing," he says. ''I started writing copy for a school textbook company so I didn't have to go to work in an office. I went into a big depression and started using drugs. That was bad enough, but it made me not do any creative work." He moved to Boston in 2002 to be near Lowenthal, but was also spending time in Kansas, taking care of his mother. She died in 2003.

Though he was coming out of his depression, he had pretty much given up on writing, he says. But then filmmaker Gregg Araki bought the rights to ''Mysterious Skin" in 2002. Though Araki liked Heim's screenplay of the novel, he decided to write his own. But instead of straying further from the novel, he actually hewed closer to it than Heim had done.

When Heim saw the result, he was startled at how faithful to the book Araki had been. ''When the film came out," he said, ''there were things in it that made me say, 'Did I write that?' There were many things that I had left out [of his own screenplay] that he had put back, things that I had forgotten."

And there was one unexpected effect.

''I was so disillusioned with the publishing business that it had clouded my confidence in my ability to write," said Heim. ''I had said, 'I hate this business, and I don't care.' But something that I had created had inspired the director and producer. They did such a wonderful job, with a difficult subject, with so little money, that it made me realize, 'I created this, and this is something I loved doing.' It made me go back to my third novel, which I had abandoned."

Recently, he sold his new novel, ''We Disappear," to HarperCollins, which had changed again since turning down an earlier version. The manuscript, which Heim says ''is very much about my mom in a lot of ways," is due in December, and he says he is writing again with renewed energy and confidence. Meanwhile, he says he and Lowenthal recently ''celebrated our 10th."

''When you neglect your art for so long -- six years of not writing at all -- you begin to question whether you have it in you," Heim said. ''Seeing my name on that panel on the huge screen -- 'Based on the novel by Scott Heim' -- has been the biggest validation of my life as a writer so far. I wish it didn't take a movie to make it happen."

David Mehegan can be reached at mehegan@globe.com.