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3.94 AVERAGE
3.94 AVERAGE
dark
mysterious
sad
tense
medium-paced
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
adventurous
dark
mysterious
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
Summer of Night is a combination of horror, suspense, mystery, and coming-of-age. It is at times grotesque, at times creepy, and at times kind of heartwarming. I got both Stephen King and Stranger Things vibes (although some others note A Boy's Life feel as well, which I haven't read yet).
My favorite parts of this:
-the 1960s Midwest smalltown setting
-the main characters - a group of mostly eleven-year-old kiddos that are sweet and funny and distinct and very, very believable/realistic and a few standout adults (Memo, I ♥️ you)
-the deep nostalgia I felt reading this (despite me not even having been a thought in the 1960s)
-the mystery of the who/what/why
-the ending, which gave me that warm and fuzzy feeling that I so desperately wanted after going through this horrific journey with these kids
But this wasn't perfect. The explanations of who/what/why are shallow if not entirely nonexistent. There is no real jaw dropping reveal that I was hoping for (such as a character we didn't know was involved). However, there are a few WTF moments that I needed recovery time on.
I really enjoyed my time with this and would love to read more Dan Simmons. This had so much atmosphere that it put me in the mood for more reads in this same genre combination and for fall (even though this takes place in summer, the creepy portions feel very autumn like and would be a great read in that season as well).
I'd probably put this somewhere between a 4.25 and 4.5 so rounding to 4 Stars.
My favorite parts of this:
-the 1960s Midwest smalltown setting
-the main characters - a group of mostly eleven-year-old kiddos that are sweet and funny and distinct and very, very believable/realistic and a few standout adults (Memo, I ♥️ you)
-the deep nostalgia I felt reading this (despite me not even having been a thought in the 1960s)
-the mystery of the who/what/why
-the ending, which gave me that warm and fuzzy feeling that I so desperately wanted after going through this horrific journey with these kids
But this wasn't perfect. The explanations of who/what/why are shallow if not entirely nonexistent. There is no real jaw dropping reveal that I was hoping for (such as a character we didn't know was involved). However, there are a few WTF moments that I needed recovery time on.
I really enjoyed my time with this and would love to read more Dan Simmons. This had so much atmosphere that it put me in the mood for more reads in this same genre combination and for fall (even though this takes place in summer, the creepy portions feel very autumn like and would be a great read in that season as well).
I'd probably put this somewhere between a 4.25 and 4.5 so rounding to 4 Stars.
I loved this book. I read it as a teen and it was a perfect coming of age story. It reminds me very much of The Body by Stephen King and Boy's Life by Robert McCammon.
Great book.
Great book.
adventurous
dark
emotional
mysterious
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
I just love coming of age horror. This was great. It held my interest the whole way through. I loved the characters. I even teared up a few times. Excellent. A must-read for anyone who likes "kids on bikes" stories.
I didn't like it, and I'm going to explain why in exhaustive and incredibly spoilery detail, and so if you don't want the entire book to be not only spoiled, but spoiled and dissected and then held up to ridicule, you should stop reading now. Like right now. Instantly.
Okay, you were warned.
First, it should be noted that I don't always like Dan Simmons. I liked Hyperion, and I loved The Terror, but Carrion Comfort left me cold, and while I made it through this one it left me so riddled with frustration that I have the need to write this godawful screed against the shortcomings of what could have been a really solid book.
It starts on the last day of school, with a bunch of 12-year-olds waiting for the bell to ring. They represent a bunch of archetypes so thoroughly that they don't need names. Leader kid, smart kid, rich kid, normal kid, sneaky kid, irrationally angry kid, and the fiscally poor possibly mentally disabled girl. Doesn't matter. Girl's brother promptly gets murdered whilst peeing/vandalizing the school, and we're off! Everyone hears it, but the faculty cover it up, so wow, okay, this is interesting, what happens next?
Nothing much. Long and rambling account of idealized male youth (the girl almost never shows up in the book). They eventually decide, for no particular reason, to look for the girls missing brother. The smart kid decides to research the school, the sneaky kid decides to follow their teacher, and everyone else decides to screw around and do nothing (which is realistic given the nature of group projects.)
The leader kid is a devout Catholic and an altar boy with an oddly close relationship to a young and hip Catholic priest, and they hang out and go fishing together, but don't think anything is going to come of that, because it's not that kind of book.
Sneaky kid promptly almost gets killed spying on the teacher, so it's up to the smart kid, who, despite laboring under every possible cliché (fat, asthma, glasses), researches the entire history of the whole creeping evil (hereafter EEEEEVIL) in the school complete with historical footnotes, and then is promptly killed before he can tell anyone.
The smart kid had a really interesting family setup with a smart and feckless uncle (killed as well, for helping with the research), and a smart and alcoholic father who is a farmer by day and mad scientist by night, and who is desperately in need of a redemption arc. Well, spoiler, he doesn't get one because it's not that kind of book. Don't try liking any adults, they're all terrible.
Fortunately smart kid wrote everything down, so we didn't actually need him anymore. The other kids find his notebooks instantly, read everything he wrote (despite it being in cryptic shorthand), and then go back to doing nothing for a while. Fortunately their fumbling around has drawn the attention of the EEEEVIL which starts sending its horrible minions to menace them with no success. Nothing to worry about from this point on, everyone has top tier plot armor, and is never in any significant danger.
Some of them take a daytrip to visit the rich guy whose ancestors founded the town and built the school. They tell him there is evil stuff everywhere. "My god, my god" he says, and collapses into a chair...And then immediately claims nothing is wrong, nothing is the matter, and runs them off, but not before they steal a heavily annotated book by Crowley...Don't think there's going to be any magic in there though, it's not that kind of book.
The "exception" to the no-magic rule is that holy water and communion wafers work great against the EEEEVIL, so you'd expect the leader kid to bring in his surprisingly not a pedophile priest friend, which he does, and then the EEEEVIL promptly barfs maggots into his (the priest's) brain, and he's gone. Remember, all adults, completely incompetent. The exception to this otherwise infallible rule is the leader kid's grandmother, an invalid only able to communicate through blinking. She is the one competent adult, and the only female character who doesn't seem to have brain damage, though she literally has brain damage.
Let me take a moment to complain about every single female character in this book. They're uniformly terrible (except grandma). The young ones are vapid, literally mentally disabled (in several cases), and inappropriately sexual for twelve-year-olds (in several cases). I'd complain about that part more, but all those doors get opened, and then people wander off, and nothing really happens. The one strongish female character is the possibly mentally disabled girl whose brother was the first victim: lot of creepy inappropriate sexuality (creepy even in the context of the book), but mentally disabled though she may-or-may not have been, she's still pretty much the smartest character left after the smart kid gets whacked, which, yes, is unfortunate.
So, our heroes, after reading all the extensive research compiled by the smart kid, stealing the Crowley book, figuring out the stuff with holy water and communion wafers, come up with a plan. Their solution is to ram a tanker full of gasoline into the school, because obviously that's the intellectual level we're working with here. If the smart kid hadn't been chewed up by a combine harvester, I'm sure he'd have been rolling in his grave.
Before this can happen (shocker) one of the kids is kidnapped into the school using a fantastically adept, magical, and clever method which it's really surprising all the evil guys never bothered using before, leading them to have to combine the subtle "ram with truckload of gasoline" plan with a heroic and poorly thought out rescue mission.
Rescue mission runs afoul of the fact that although the EEEEEVIL is vulnerable to religious iconography (apparently because of its upbringing in ancient Egypt? Even I couldn't suspend disbelief at this point) all of the minions are atheists, and so it doesn't work on them. But fortunately the giant truckload of gasoline arrives and saves the day, and no one dies except all the bad people who are, of course, adept at all things except evading truckloads of gasoline.
Okay. That's the book. Over and over again Simmons introduced some stuff that could have been developed into something really interesting. The adults were far more nuanced and fleshed-out than the kids tended to be, but once they were developed, they died or disappeared. I get it, it's not a book about adults...But why take all the good bits and waste it on them? Why lovingly craft and introduce them if you're going to waste them? Why not put that effort into crafting kids that exist as something more than a dull archetype?
Likewise the big EEEEVIL. What an interesting and gothic backstory! There was a lot there, but there didn't need to be, because none of it mattered in the end. I felt like the actual evil guys themselves were misused: occasionally they were really nice and horrific, but 99% of the time they were just vaguely threatening, and they were all repeatedly stopped by shut doors. Maybe a vampirish "can't cross the threshold" sort of thing, but they violate that rule repeatedly, so it made no sense other than to prolong the book and slow down the action.
I don't know. I felt like there was a lot of potential, and it was all squandered on dead ends and meaningless backstory. They could have torched the school on day one, and it would have been exactly the same.
It's hard not to compare this to IT (by Stephen King). Kids, creepy history, big shapeshifting evil, lot of inappropriate sexuality. But IT, for all its flaws, did a better job with the wonder of childhood, and IT did a better job with history and worldbuilding that actually mattered, and IT had a satisfying and scary villain.
Okay, you were warned.
First, it should be noted that I don't always like Dan Simmons. I liked Hyperion, and I loved The Terror, but Carrion Comfort left me cold, and while I made it through this one it left me so riddled with frustration that I have the need to write this godawful screed against the shortcomings of what could have been a really solid book.
It starts on the last day of school, with a bunch of 12-year-olds waiting for the bell to ring. They represent a bunch of archetypes so thoroughly that they don't need names. Leader kid, smart kid, rich kid, normal kid, sneaky kid, irrationally angry kid, and the fiscally poor possibly mentally disabled girl. Doesn't matter. Girl's brother promptly gets murdered whilst peeing/vandalizing the school, and we're off! Everyone hears it, but the faculty cover it up, so wow, okay, this is interesting, what happens next?
Nothing much. Long and rambling account of idealized male youth (the girl almost never shows up in the book). They eventually decide, for no particular reason, to look for the girls missing brother. The smart kid decides to research the school, the sneaky kid decides to follow their teacher, and everyone else decides to screw around and do nothing (which is realistic given the nature of group projects.)
The leader kid is a devout Catholic and an altar boy with an oddly close relationship to a young and hip Catholic priest, and they hang out and go fishing together, but don't think anything is going to come of that, because it's not that kind of book.
Sneaky kid promptly almost gets killed spying on the teacher, so it's up to the smart kid, who, despite laboring under every possible cliché (fat, asthma, glasses), researches the entire history of the whole creeping evil (hereafter EEEEEVIL) in the school complete with historical footnotes, and then is promptly killed before he can tell anyone.
The smart kid had a really interesting family setup with a smart and feckless uncle (killed as well, for helping with the research), and a smart and alcoholic father who is a farmer by day and mad scientist by night, and who is desperately in need of a redemption arc. Well, spoiler, he doesn't get one because it's not that kind of book. Don't try liking any adults, they're all terrible.
Fortunately smart kid wrote everything down, so we didn't actually need him anymore. The other kids find his notebooks instantly, read everything he wrote (despite it being in cryptic shorthand), and then go back to doing nothing for a while. Fortunately their fumbling around has drawn the attention of the EEEEVIL which starts sending its horrible minions to menace them with no success. Nothing to worry about from this point on, everyone has top tier plot armor, and is never in any significant danger.
Some of them take a daytrip to visit the rich guy whose ancestors founded the town and built the school. They tell him there is evil stuff everywhere. "My god, my god" he says, and collapses into a chair...And then immediately claims nothing is wrong, nothing is the matter, and runs them off, but not before they steal a heavily annotated book by Crowley...Don't think there's going to be any magic in there though, it's not that kind of book.
The "exception" to the no-magic rule is that holy water and communion wafers work great against the EEEEVIL, so you'd expect the leader kid to bring in his surprisingly not a pedophile priest friend, which he does, and then the EEEEVIL promptly barfs maggots into his (the priest's) brain, and he's gone. Remember, all adults, completely incompetent. The exception to this otherwise infallible rule is the leader kid's grandmother, an invalid only able to communicate through blinking. She is the one competent adult, and the only female character who doesn't seem to have brain damage, though she literally has brain damage.
Let me take a moment to complain about every single female character in this book. They're uniformly terrible (except grandma). The young ones are vapid, literally mentally disabled (in several cases), and inappropriately sexual for twelve-year-olds (in several cases). I'd complain about that part more, but all those doors get opened, and then people wander off, and nothing really happens. The one strongish female character is the possibly mentally disabled girl whose brother was the first victim: lot of creepy inappropriate sexuality (creepy even in the context of the book), but mentally disabled though she may-or-may not have been, she's still pretty much the smartest character left after the smart kid gets whacked, which, yes, is unfortunate.
So, our heroes, after reading all the extensive research compiled by the smart kid, stealing the Crowley book, figuring out the stuff with holy water and communion wafers, come up with a plan. Their solution is to ram a tanker full of gasoline into the school, because obviously that's the intellectual level we're working with here. If the smart kid hadn't been chewed up by a combine harvester, I'm sure he'd have been rolling in his grave.
Before this can happen (shocker) one of the kids is kidnapped into the school using a fantastically adept, magical, and clever method which it's really surprising all the evil guys never bothered using before, leading them to have to combine the subtle "ram with truckload of gasoline" plan with a heroic and poorly thought out rescue mission.
Rescue mission runs afoul of the fact that although the EEEEEVIL is vulnerable to religious iconography (apparently because of its upbringing in ancient Egypt? Even I couldn't suspend disbelief at this point) all of the minions are atheists, and so it doesn't work on them. But fortunately the giant truckload of gasoline arrives and saves the day, and no one dies except all the bad people who are, of course, adept at all things except evading truckloads of gasoline.
Okay. That's the book. Over and over again Simmons introduced some stuff that could have been developed into something really interesting. The adults were far more nuanced and fleshed-out than the kids tended to be, but once they were developed, they died or disappeared. I get it, it's not a book about adults...But why take all the good bits and waste it on them? Why lovingly craft and introduce them if you're going to waste them? Why not put that effort into crafting kids that exist as something more than a dull archetype?
Likewise the big EEEEVIL. What an interesting and gothic backstory! There was a lot there, but there didn't need to be, because none of it mattered in the end. I felt like the actual evil guys themselves were misused: occasionally they were really nice and horrific, but 99% of the time they were just vaguely threatening, and they were all repeatedly stopped by shut doors. Maybe a vampirish "can't cross the threshold" sort of thing, but they violate that rule repeatedly, so it made no sense other than to prolong the book and slow down the action.
I don't know. I felt like there was a lot of potential, and it was all squandered on dead ends and meaningless backstory. They could have torched the school on day one, and it would have been exactly the same.
It's hard not to compare this to IT (by Stephen King). Kids, creepy history, big shapeshifting evil, lot of inappropriate sexuality. But IT, for all its flaws, did a better job with the wonder of childhood, and IT did a better job with history and worldbuilding that actually mattered, and IT had a satisfying and scary villain.
5 Stars
This is in the same "vein" as [b:Boy's Life|11553|Boy's Life|Robert McCammon|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1314302694s/11553.jpg|16685995] and [b:It|830502|It|Stephen King|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1334416842s/830502.jpg|150259], as far as the tone of the book and the coming-of-age aspect. This was a true horror novel, with some creepy aspects that weirded me out. This novel started off at a nice, slow pace and continued to ramp up with each chapter. The build-up was nice and slow, until the pressure was too much; then it was every boy for himself...or girl.
This was so much fun to read, and I hated having to put it down. I am so ready to read the next. Highly recommended horror
This is in the same "vein" as [b:Boy's Life|11553|Boy's Life|Robert McCammon|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1314302694s/11553.jpg|16685995] and [b:It|830502|It|Stephen King|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1334416842s/830502.jpg|150259], as far as the tone of the book and the coming-of-age aspect. This was a true horror novel, with some creepy aspects that weirded me out. This novel started off at a nice, slow pace and continued to ramp up with each chapter. The build-up was nice and slow, until the pressure was too much; then it was every boy for himself...or girl.
This was so much fun to read, and I hated having to put it down. I am so ready to read the next. Highly recommended horror
So this is King’s “It” without anything that made that book a master craft. The number of parallels are dizzying, if I’m being honest, and I’m left wondering if that alone tainted my experience with this book. I can never be sure, but I don’t think so.
Overall, the prose is flowery but good. Some passages are beautiful. However Simmons has a tendency to overset the scene. Incredibly detailed descriptions of where things are and what is moving where really slows the pace to a crawl. Additionally, entire stretches of the book are just unnecessary. I could tell Simmons was trying to evoke nostalgic feelings of the summer freedom children experience, but 30 pages of kids playing baseball and swimming in a quarry is so extraneous.
Some characters were very good - namely Duane and Mike (also a name utilized in “It”). Harlen had his moments. I couldn’t tell you much about any of the others.
Some of the scary scenes were good. But by the end of it all it felt like nothing I read had anything to say. It was like a haunted house of “It” without any of the themes or depth. I finished the book feeling the same fulfillment of a bottom-shelf thriller but it was three times as long and without any of the thrilling pace.
I enjoyed it. I’d even read more of Simmons’s work. But this was just OKAY.
Overall, the prose is flowery but good. Some passages are beautiful. However Simmons has a tendency to overset the scene. Incredibly detailed descriptions of where things are and what is moving where really slows the pace to a crawl. Additionally, entire stretches of the book are just unnecessary. I could tell Simmons was trying to evoke nostalgic feelings of the summer freedom children experience, but 30 pages of kids playing baseball and swimming in a quarry is so extraneous.
Some characters were very good - namely Duane and Mike (also a name utilized in “It”). Harlen had his moments. I couldn’t tell you much about any of the others.
Some of the scary scenes were good. But by the end of it all it felt like nothing I read had anything to say. It was like a haunted house of “It” without any of the themes or depth. I finished the book feeling the same fulfillment of a bottom-shelf thriller but it was three times as long and without any of the thrilling pace.
I enjoyed it. I’d even read more of Simmons’s work. But this was just OKAY.
dark
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
I was unaware of Dan Simmons, admittedly terrible, politics until after I read this. I'm not sure I see it reflected in work this early, and from what I understand some of this early work actually tends to lean away from the awful stances he embraced around 9/11ish.
This book was almost unreadably slow. A kind of riff on bradbury/king-esque themes without the same level of finesse or skill. A sort of tween (11 year olds for the most part, give or take a few years) coming-of-age meets horror, in a time of social and technological transformation from the 50s/60s (though what he describes seems more like the 30s/40s?) to the 80s and small town rural life to something more modern and urbane, with dark and evil happenings laid on top of it.
Besides the aforementioned anachronistic problems with setting, there are a variety of flaws here. The pacing is not just slow, but glacial. Virtually nothing of importance or interest happens for hundreds of pages at a time. We get lots of nice portraits of small town life, but that's almost all we get. I get its a coming of age story, but there are hundreds of total pages devoted to the games 11 year olds play during their summers off school. Hundreds of pages are spent with the characters chasing red herrings, that even the narrators think are red herrings and a waste of time. There are loads of disparate and essentially unrelated disturbing narrative threads that get introduced for a few pages before we end up returning to endless descriptions of pickup baseball games, bullies, etc. I get that they're all technically a result of what the ultimate evil is, but the eventual unifying explanation is thin and weak at best.
I hesitate to say there are too many characters, because King handles a similar if not larger spread of young folks coming of age masterfully...so maybe it was just too many for Simmons. Only one or two of our protagonists really stand out as much more than character sketches, and some of the most interesting young people aren't even our main characters. For all they're supposed to be a tightknit, friends for years, grew up together group...they also just don't seem to like each other very much? Just like each other more than the richer kids or the homicidally violent 13 year olds? Also, I get small town life, and life in the 50s, was different, that education was different (hell, I'm an educator, I'm acutely aware)...but there are a difficult to believe number of young people described (to varying degrees of insensitivity) as having cognitive deficiencies of one degree or another, being held back multiple years and/or just quitting school before high school.
What it mostly feels like is Simmons had too many ideas and was not sure what kind of book he wanted to write. I think it could have successfully been split into a few unrelated stories of more moderate length. A Boy's Life esque coming of age. A ghost story. A rich people are the bad guys thriller. Maybe a small town slice of life. A (couple of) monster story(ies). Maybe a backwoods/rural thriller or horror of some kind. Instead its all kind of inexpertly smashed together and told at a turtle's pace.
I understand that other books of his are better, and while I won't give the nutter any money I'll try some of the more focused books from the library before I give up on him altogether.
This book was almost unreadably slow. A kind of riff on bradbury/king-esque themes without the same level of finesse or skill. A sort of tween (11 year olds for the most part, give or take a few years) coming-of-age meets horror, in a time of social and technological transformation from the 50s/60s (though what he describes seems more like the 30s/40s?) to the 80s and small town rural life to something more modern and urbane, with dark and evil happenings laid on top of it.
Besides the aforementioned anachronistic problems with setting, there are a variety of flaws here. The pacing is not just slow, but glacial. Virtually nothing of importance or interest happens for hundreds of pages at a time. We get lots of nice portraits of small town life, but that's almost all we get. I get its a coming of age story, but there are hundreds of total pages devoted to the games 11 year olds play during their summers off school. Hundreds of pages are spent with the characters chasing red herrings, that even the narrators think are red herrings and a waste of time. There are loads of disparate and essentially unrelated disturbing narrative threads that get introduced for a few pages before we end up returning to endless descriptions of pickup baseball games, bullies, etc. I get that they're all technically a result of what the ultimate evil is, but the eventual unifying explanation is thin and weak at best.
I hesitate to say there are too many characters, because King handles a similar if not larger spread of young folks coming of age masterfully...so maybe it was just too many for Simmons. Only one or two of our protagonists really stand out as much more than character sketches, and some of the most interesting young people aren't even our main characters. For all they're supposed to be a tightknit, friends for years, grew up together group...they also just don't seem to like each other very much? Just like each other more than the richer kids or the homicidally violent 13 year olds? Also, I get small town life, and life in the 50s, was different, that education was different (hell, I'm an educator, I'm acutely aware)...but there are a difficult to believe number of young people described (to varying degrees of insensitivity) as having cognitive deficiencies of one degree or another, being held back multiple years and/or just quitting school before high school.
What it mostly feels like is Simmons had too many ideas and was not sure what kind of book he wanted to write. I think it could have successfully been split into a few unrelated stories of more moderate length. A Boy's Life esque coming of age. A ghost story. A rich people are the bad guys thriller. Maybe a small town slice of life. A (couple of) monster story(ies). Maybe a backwoods/rural thriller or horror of some kind. Instead its all kind of inexpertly smashed together and told at a turtle's pace.
I understand that other books of his are better, and while I won't give the nutter any money I'll try some of the more focused books from the library before I give up on him altogether.