Angelhead

"My brother saw the face of God. You never recover from a trauma like that."So begins Angelhead, a taut, powerful memoir of the madness and crime that rips a family apart. "I didn't see God, of course, but I saw my brother seeing God; I saw how petrified he was, how convinced."Set in Tidewater, Virginia, in the 1980s and early 1990s, Angelhead documents the violent, drug-addled, schizophrenic descent of the author's brother, Michael. Commencing with Michael's first psychotic break at age 14 — high on acid, seeing God in his suburban bedroom window — through a series of petty crimes, bizarre disappearances, and suicide attempts to the shocking crime that landed him in the psychiatric wing of a maximum security prison, Angelhead enables us to witness firsthand, as never before, the fragmenting of a mind and a family."I knew, still know, that he saw, in some form, His or Her or Its face."Bottoms shows, in pitch-perfect...