The Scar Boys

The Scar Boys (2014), an essay-style teenage novel written by Len Vlahos, is told from the perspective of a teenage protagonist, Harry Jones, who suffered a lightning strike as a child that left him seriously burned and disfigured. Prompted by anxiety over a college admissions essay, which expects him to summarize his life in 250 words, Jones, instead, writes the book comprising the novel. Vlahos, through Jones’ character, offers a humanizing account of the reality of physical deformity in youth, as he presents the unusual obstacles and coping strategies in a 1980s East Coast world — some of them mistaken — that comprise his coming of age story.

The novel begins with Jones recalling the lightning strike he endured as a child and its accompanying social isolation and bullying. He remembers his first defining moment as being a day in eighth grade when neighborhood bullies tied him to a tree during a lightning storm. The tree was struck by a bolt of lightning, catching fire. Jones recalls the excruciating aftermath, and both the physical and emotional scars he continues to live with. His everyday reality is fraught with feelings of strangeness and alienation, made worse by incessant bullying at school.

Eventually, Jones meets a classmate, Johnny McKenna. Well-liked by the rest of their grade, Jones is initially excited to befriend Johnny, a friendship which seems to promise some of the social capital he believes he has always lacked. Handsome and charismatic, Johnny represents unobtainable qualities of life to Jones. Around the same time, Jones forms a crush on a classmate, Cheyenne. He is rejected, as Cheyenne categorizes him as a friend, while Johnny dates her despite knowing about Jones’s crush. He opens up about it to Johnny, who in response suggests that they focus on starting a band. In their creative endeavor, Johnny becomes the singer, and Jones begins to take guitar lessons to learn to play. Jones names the band The Scar Boys, referencing his disfigured face.

The Scar Boys become popular over time, securing local gigs and even a large gig at a famous venue in New York City. When they lose their first bass player, Cheyenne steps in to fill the role. They decide to start a summer tour, where they face defining obstacles together, such as a car breakdown, running out of money, fighting between each other, and jealousies over Cheyenne. Despite these obstacles, Jones feels more humanized than before having to struggle to make the group effort work out.

After weeks of reviewing records at Johnny’s house, he and Jones find both a bass player and a drummer, completing their band’s cast. Jones is euphoric upon experiencing the act of playing onstage. He feels as though through music and stage performance, he transcends his body and therefore his disfigurement. Still, to cope with people’s judgment, he wears huge hats and sunglasses onstage, usually facing away from them to avoid being seen. Jones gets great comfort from Johnny, who doesn’t care how he looks.

The narrative, meanwhile, slowly reveals Johnny’s ulterior motive for befriending Jones. He believes Jones’s scar is part of their band’s charm. As the novel moves forward, Jones gradually becomes aware of Johnny’s highly Machiavellian personality and actions. Johnny always insists on making the executive decisions in any situation, whether in their band or in other interpersonal situations, like selectively picking when to hang out with Jones. Johnny uses the power he holds from his privilege of being physically and socially “normal” to squelch Jones’ voice and social agency, especially when challenged.

The crux of the novel is in Jones’s struggle to negotiate this dysfunctional friendship and the course of his passage through the formative social institution of a public school with his passion for the escape of performance and music. Having never excelled academically, Jones’s grades plummet after The Scar Boys is created. He expresses a hope to pursue a music education after high school because it improves his well being.

Although The Scar Boys never quite succeed in reaching rock and roll fame, the band acts as a catalyst for Jones’s social integration at the end of the novel, symbolized by the act of writing the novel itself and formalizing his history into a cohesive narrative and an act of self-therapy. Jones notes that he ends up more successful than most of his classmates, who go off to toil in McDonald’s, the mall, or other dead-end pursuits, while he continues to pursue his dream.

Filtered through Jones’s memory at a time of both heightened self-discovery and naivety, the internal narratives and perspectives of his classmates never fully emerge. Through Jones’s naive perspective, Vlahos illuminates the heightened, sometimes limiting, self-consciousness that is set up as a challenge to those who have disfigurements, and how it can threaten to curtail and interrupt self-love, rich interpersonal connections, and social development.