Book Review: Summer of Night by Dan Simmons (1991)
Warner Aspect
(This review has a clearly marked spoiler wall.)
“Few events in a human being’s life […] are as free, as exuberant, as infinitely expansive and filled with potential as the first day of summer when one is an eleven-year-old boy. The summer lies ahead like a great banquet and the days are filled with rich, slow time in which to enjoy each course.”
Dan Simmons’s Summer of Night tells the story of a group of children in the fictional small town of Elm Haven, Illinois who confront an ancient evil at the heart of their community. The novel is a coming-of-age saga, boomer nostalgia trip, and occult horror story rolled into one, treading on and digging deep in familiar, fertile ground.
The novel begins where all coming-of-age horror stories probably should: the first day of summer vacation. The year is 1960, and our cast of characters is counting the minutes until the last schoolbell of the year sounds the call to unnumbered days of baseball at the park, swimming in the quarry, camping under the stars, and launching fireworks into the skies where Sputnik flew only a few years before. Old Central, their monolithic white elephant of a school, is scheduled to be torn down over the summer and the boys and girls of the Elm haven are all silently relieved that they won’t be returning to the nineteenth-century building.
Then, Tubby Cooke, a blue-collar social outcast whose family lives by the dump at the edge of town, wanders down to the basement of the school to use the bathroom and disappears from the idyllic Illinois countryside for good, an event that will hang dark over the summer to come.
Soon after we see our cast in focus: Mike, the devout Irish Catholic boy and natural leader; Dale Stewart and his little brother, Lawrence, who create a natural push-pull between the older brother’s sensitive introspection and the younger’s impulsiveness; Duane McBride, the intelligent, oversized farmboy who lives at the edge of town with his eccentric alcoholic father; and Jim Harten, the quick-witted class clown of the group. Peripheral to these are Kevin Grumbacher, whose only remarkable quality seems to be that he is middle-class while the other kids are poor, and Cordie Cooke, hardtalking sister of the missing Tubby. For the last case, picture a junior high Fortune Feimster who isn’t funny and feels more comfortable handling a shotgun than an oven mitt.
Summer begins in earnest, with the boys hatching a plan to spy on many of Old Central’s staff in an effort to unearth what happened to Tubby Cooke. Amid endless arrays of baby boomer boyhood nostalgia episodes, there are increasingly overt and dangerous indicators that something is deeply wrong in the town of Elm Haven, and that wrongless lies at the heart of the old school itself. Then Duane, my favorite character, has a harrowing encounter where the mysterious driver of the county’s rendering truck–an oversized industrial vehicle used to collect dead animal carcasses–makes an overt and dogged effort to murder him as he is walking into town. Clearly, there’s something to the boys' suspicions, and their sleuthing is drawing dangerous attention.
From here on, there be spoilers.
The Shadow over Summer
There’s a shadow that looms over the novel, and it’s best I acknowledge it right from the top. If you can peer out to the edges of its massive girth, you might be able to discern that this shadow is a recognizable clown-shape, and be Tim Curry, Bill Skarsgård, or a Pennywise of your own imagining that fills the form, you must accept that it is virtually impossible to talk about this story without also talking about Stephen King’s IT. That is as true today as it was on the day of Summer of Night’s publication in January of 1991.
Both stories feature a group of young children in the early 1960s who are pitted against an ancient, antediluvian evil, and both contain an indulgent number of scenes romanticizing childhood as it was experienced during this period. And both novels, I think, are excellently written. While the rural Elm Haven feels a great distance from Derry, Maine, both towns have untethered bullies that epitomize the sharpest edges of childhood social trauma, treehouse headquarters where grand plans are cobbled together and picked apart, young women of impossible poise and mystique, and parents who remain remarkably oblivious to the cosmic terror that their children are facing.
Despite being published four-and-a-half years after King’s monolith, Simmons’s publishers decided to greenlight Summer of Night despite its similarities, and we have a novel that, while not as good as IT, stands well enough on its own merits. King’s novel is infinitely more romantic–IT is full of magic, and while substantial, the roots of his setting go only as far as the story needs. Simmons, on the other hand, is cut from a coarser cloth, setting down the long histories of his locales and stories back to their founding in detail that can be supplemented by hours on Wikipedia. Pennywise, though ancient, is given only an oblique and piecemeal history back a few hundred years, while the evil in Summer of Night will be chronicled back to ancient Egypt and the roots of the Western esoteric magical tradition. Even Old Central, the darkened stage at the heart of the novel, receives an expansive history from foundation to parapets before Dan is done with his tale.
While I personally love when an author creates an exhaustive history for everything in his story, I recognize I’m in a minority on this issue. Most modern readers want fit, clever, sixty-thousand-word manuscripts with minimal development and action, action, action. As such, you may find Summer of Night too testudinate to enjoy.
In more crucial contrast, Simmons’s pack of summertime outlaws lack the imagination and heart of King’s; there are no silver earrings, no being brave until the monster backs down, no swearing oaths at the end of a battle where the protagonists have defeated their greatest fears. When the going gets tough, the boys and girls of Elm Haven, Illinois lock and load, procuring half a dozen firearms and a tanker full of gasoline they can use to burn much of the story to the ground. The Bike Patrol, as they call themselves, are decidedly less interesting than The Losers’ Club. There’s also a distinct lack of diversity–all the boys are poor-to-lower-middle class–but this fairly reflects the demographics of most small towns in Illinois, and because Simmons has made no secret that characters are drawn from his own childhood, I suppose this isn’t something we should gripe about overmuch. I did have a hard time falling for the cast initially, if only because it took them a bit more time to present interesting qualities.
But that’s not to say Simmons’s novel doesn't have its charms and strengths. One of my favorite aspects of Summer of Night was being more than two-thirds of the way through it and still having no clear read on what the evil in Elm Haven was. Pennywise is front and center, introduced even before our protagonists in King’s novel, but here Simmons gives us only the outline of the greater evil, forcing us to content ourselves with the ghost of a doughboy, a zombie teacher, the rendering truck, but the single identifiable force behind the curtain and master puppeteer of the aforementioned remains hidden almost until the end.
I’m not saying it’s better than Pennywise the Dancing Clown–it decidedly is not–but it is a great way to set the book apart from its most ready comparison, and the horror it offers should be appreciated for its own merits.
Rife with nostalgic digressions and interludes, baseball, dirt clod wars, and other setpieces so endemic and universally associated with childhood in the late 1950s and early 1960s as to feel cliché, these are lengthy and frequent but eventually make some small tie-back to the evil that haunts Elm Haven. As is eventually revealed, the evil here is rooted in the Western esoteric tradition, but I ultimately don’t think Simmons makes a great use of it. Perhaps invoking Crowley and the Golden Dawn was more mysterious in 2001, but today these almost feel like exhaustive pantomimes for anyone who regularly consumes horror media. Simply put, The Book of the Law is far less dissuading when you can order a copy on Amazon. This isn’t a fault of the author, but it is a pitfall for the book when reading in the modern era.
There were some other decisions I didn’t care for–there’s a hard acceleration in weirdness after the death of a character midway through the book, and it almost felt like a moment where Dan said ‘okay, time to stop reliving childhood and get on with this damned thing.’ Continuing with the comparison to IT, the actions taken to combat the evil were far less creative but admittedly realistic–when it becomes clear that their lives are in danger, the first thing the boys do is form a posse and go after it. There is an actual shootout between them and the evil’s human agents at one point. It’s the kind of scene that feels somewhat out-of-place in a novel about childhood nostalgia, but I won’t say it didn’t work to some degree.
There’s also some awkward structuring. A significant support character disappears in the middle of a setpiece that doesn’t involve him, and the plot plays catch-up on this through a hastily relayed memory. I get the impression that Simmons either grew tired of writing out his original ambition, or had a deadline looming. There are also some action scenes that feel forced, as if the author suddenly realized that a direct conflict was necessary.
My biggest complaint–and this harms the book, undoubtedly, is that most of the villains are given precious little page time, and we never really find out a satisfying reason for why or how they became entangled with the evil in Old Central. Finally there’s also the noticeable absence of major character’s perspective chapters–Cordie Cooke specifically felt like she was too important to the story to be left to the third person. These sins are few, but they are present, and they do affect the reader’s experience.
Despite ending on a negative note, I thoroughly enjoyed Summer of Night as a reader. It’s a solid, well-worked novel with a lot of heartblood in its pages. Clearly a passion project and ode to Simmons’s roots, it should be read by all of his fans, even if it’s not his finest work.
You can read my review to Summer of Night’s follow-up novel here.
Verdict: 6.8/10
Strengths
Strong setting with deep roots
Hits the Boomer generation nostalgia notes as well as anything
Consistent quality from start to finish
Doesn’t have a weird scene like that one that exists in IT
Weaknesses
Ultimately an inferior novel to IT, from which it cannot escape comparison
Many characters felt they deserved perspective chapters, but didn’t get them
Lots of unrealized potential, particularly with the antagonists.
You can purchase Summer of Night at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Target, or preferably, through an independent bookstore in your community.
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