Summer of Night

Staring at the clock, watching the minute hand creep towards the end of another school year with summer vacation only moments away, we are introduced to the last group of students attending Old Central School. As the minutes tick by, a fifth-grader walks the hallway down to the boys’ bathroom intent on completing his recent act of vandalism, breaking through one of the walls. He disappears. An eerie scream is heard throughout the school as the final bell rings and the handful of students seem disturbed by the sound are quickly assured by the teachers the noise is due to the age of the building.

It’s 1960 in Elm Haven, Illinois, a small community surrounded by cornfields and seeded with a haunted past that has re-awakened, attempting show more to claim the town. The only obstacle to achieving that goal is the bicycle patrol, consisting of Mike, Dale, Lawrence, Jim, Kevin, and Duane.

Dan Simmons has created a wonderful, nostalgic glimpse into a childhood past with the activities of his protagonists. Saturday night free movies at the makeshift drive-in, lazy days of sleeping in, dirt-clod wars, swimming in the nearby water-hole, and pup-tent camping. What would normally be a tale of growing up in small town America, becomes a background to the more sinister plot of an ancient evil resurrected, and using the community leaders to further its influence.
Losing the innocence of youth to the realities and sometimes harsher consequences of adult decisions, we watch this group of youngsters grow and cope with the evil that only they seem to be able to see and confront.

There are strong resemblances to other coming of age stories set in a horror genre, and Simmons does a nice job of building and fleshing out most of his characters while slowly introducing the monsters under the bed.

I didn’t want to put this one down, not because it allowed me to keep the light on during the night, but that I wanted to see just how ingenious the tenacious youths would be in the final showdown.

Ah but for the glory days of summer, where one could jump on a bicycle and roam the neighborhoods for hours, with no cares or worries except to be home for dinner. show less

I was urged to read this book by a friend after I panned Simmons' "Drood," a book vaster than empires and more slow. Six hundred pages into it and with another 300 to go, I tossed it aside, but said friend assured me that "Summer of Night" was more typical Simmons. My response, after completing the book," is a resounding "Yes, and..?"

Simmons' horror novel is less ponderous than his historical fiction, but only marginally so. The story is this: somewhere in the midwest, a bunch of tweenage boys go toe-to-toe with a horrible beastie-thingie out of mythology which has gained control over many of the adult authority figures in their little town. It's the kind of thing Stephen King would go all slam-bang-splatter over, and Neil Gaiman would show more infuse with wit and charm, but Simmon's storytelling style is so leisurely and his characters so underdeveloped that I was bored before I ever got to the Big Confrontation.

Part of the problem is that Simmons has multiple main characters. There's Duane (stocky stolid bookworm), Michael (dedicated altar boy who has a special bond with his disabled grandma), Harlan (who resents his promiscuous mother), Kevin (whose father drives a milk tanker - honest, that's all I can remember about him), as well as Dale and and his little brother Lawrence, who are...well, brothers. Lots of main characters usually translates to lots of backstory, and Simmons has an irritating habit of leaving one of his boys at a crucial moment to switch to another, build that kid's story to a climax and then leave us hanging while he moves to yet another boy. This plate-spinning style of narration makes it hard to remember what Duane was up to, for example, when we finally get back to him after going through the Harlan/Kevin/Michael/Dale and Lawrence cycle, and meanwhile the forward movement of the main plot slows to a crawl. (Female characters are strictly peripheral in this book, although Cordie, a stereotypical girl from the wrong side of town, is more memorable than some of the major boy characters.)

Perhaps it's a consequence of Simmons' focus on keeping up with so many subplots, but the development/explanation of the demonic forces seemed flabby and underdeveloped. And (SPOILER AHEAD) isn't it a rather lame literary cliché to have the town's resident Wealthy Folks to blame for the Bad Stuff That's Happening?

I now feel that I've given Simmons enough of my time. I know he has his fans, and I don't think he's a bad writer - but there are other authors out there waiting to be discovered. So long, Dan. show less

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 show more 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. show less

I have owned a paperback copy of this for about 15 years and while I want to kick myself for never having read it, I think I read it at the perfect time in my life.

The book is set in the fictional town of Elm Haven, IL which lies in between the non-fictional towns of Galesburg and Peoria. I have lived in Illinois for 44 of my 47 years on this earth and moved to the Peoria-area four years ago. As mentioned, reading it now was the perfect time for me.

This book is ostensibly a horror story but it's so much more..... The book is set in 1960 and chronicles that summer and the adventures of a troupe of young boys. The book has a deliberate pace as the chilling story unfolds and you could argue that it meanders a bit, but that's the show more charm.....it's paced like a lazy summer with long days and all the time in the world. Simmons' prose is fabulous and keeps you engaged even through its "meanderings."

This book gets compared to Stephen King's "IT," his short story "The Body" (a.k.a. the movie "Stand By Me") and Robert R. McCammon's "Boys Life." I've only read King's works and I would agree, but this one is better. Trust me. show less

(11) Wow - Stephen King eat your heart out. This was published ~ 5 years after Stephen King's 'It' - I can't remember too much about that novel but surely it must have inspired this one. Simmons is an incredibly versatile author who is a fantastic story-teller. I have read several of his novels now (The Terror, Song of Kali, The Crook Factory, Drood) and they are all page turners and really quite different. 'The Terror' still remains my favorite but this was a pretty intriguing yarn and must be a close second.

Comparisons with 'It" are obvious - a group of close knit pre-teen boys in small town America before the dawning of the internet and social media - when bikes and baseball were Kings -- battle Evil (with a capital E) as it comes show more to their little idyllic corner of the world. In this case 'the Borgia Bell' resides in their creepy school which is about to be torn down. The boys begin to see things that are inexplicable and horrifying beginning with the last day of school when a classmate goes missing. The contextual details are amazing - The smell of the Rendering Truck, Duane's flannel shirt and the glasses he keeps adjusting on his face, the blanching relentless heat of a midsummer day, preteen half-man, half-boy confusion -- all so well-done.

It was a bit long, I think. I am not sure which parts needed to be dispensed with besides that awful sex scene with 12 year olds. But, there were times I felt like skimming to get to the action. I did think the finale in the school was a bit over the top - I think perhaps 'less is more' would have sufficed regarding all the tissue nodes, and eyes, and flesh farms everywhere. It undermined part of the excellent fear factor that had been built up with melodrama. It was its best before all was explicit such as the scene in Dale's basement, or the ones in Dale and Lawrence's room - what kid has not been horrified with 'the basement,' 'under the bed,' or the possibilities of 'the bedroom closet.'

Anyway, incredibly entertaining. I will miss Dale and Lawrence and Mike's world. I think I may seek out the sequels and ? the movie. Definitely need to read more by this author. show less

After reading THE TERROR a few years ago, I knew Dam Simmons could write, but I didn’t know how well he could write until I finished SUMMER OF NIGHT, a book that was a Christmas gift which sat on my shelf a few years too long – I was really denying myself a great read. Simmons’ mastery of character, place and time is among the best, and the traits of a true storyteller.

At first glance, SUMMER OF NIGHT appears to be nothing more than another nostalgic coming of age horror story set in a small town in 1960; the kind where only the adolescent protagonists catch on to the supernatural evil in their midst and have to fight it on their own. This plot is an old horror trope, same for the small town in America with dark secrets no one show more will talk about, where and ancient evil has lain dormant until just the right moment to come back to life, but these seeming clichés are so well handled by Simmons, the reader hardly notices. The central characters are a group of boys around the age of 12, some slightly older, others slightly younger, who are best buds in the 6th grade at the Old Central Elementary School in Elm Haven, Illinois. Their home situations are varied and different, so are their temperaments and personalities; one of the great strengths of this book is how much Simmons makes you care about and fear for Duane, Jim, Mike, Kevin, Dale and Lawrence. And their small town world is so well laid out that the reader will come to see it perfectly in their minds: the tree lined streets and the stores on Main, the dirt country roads with cornfields on either side. We can feel the heat and smell the humidity ahead of a thunder storm. One of the essentials of these stories is a well established sense of mood and place and Simmons pulls it off with flying colors.

Though it is set in the summer of 1960, Simmons does not turn it into a trip back to AMERICAN GRAFFITI, instead the nostalgia the author evokes is for a time when the most priceless thing a boy could own was a second hand bicycle, followed by a baseball glove. A time when kids had the freedom on summer vacation to walk out the door first thing in the morning and not come back until dinner was on the table and no one thought anything of it. It’s a nostalgia for a time when kids were expected to amuse themselves for hours on end in a time before childhood and adolescence were overwhelmed by a loud, overbearing and ostentatiously sexy popular culture that treated kids like consumers; a time when small towns still thrived, long before automation, outsourcing, globalization and Wal Mart were even on the horizon. It might be the summer of ‘60, but the nomination of JFK is mentioned maybe twice as an event that is happening very far away.

On the last day of school, one of the boy’s classmates, Tubby Cook, goes missing in Old Central, the same day that the peal of a long silent bell is heard. Soon our young protagonists begin to suspect that their teachers and principle were involved in the disappearance. As they try to get to the bottom of the mystery, a figure in a World War I uniform is seen lurking on the back roads, faces appear at windows in the night while other figures lurk in the darkness; shadows dart out of closets and hide under beds, things stir inside crawlspaces and basements; holes leading to tunnels under the earth are found, and as they learn more, a huge rendering truck begins to stalk the kids. Though they might be scared as hell, they also have plenty of grit, and knowing that the adults would not believe them, the boys – along with one girl - decide take on the evil in their midst, a battle that ultimately becomes a war – one that claims casualties before the final confrontation.
There is a twist about half way through the book, one that will leave many readers picking their jaws up off the floor, while others will be profoundly grief stricken. The fact that so many fans of this book have commented on their emotional reaction to this event is one sign this book has really connected. My favorite scene is when Jim and Dale turn the tables on the town’s punk ass bully and back him down when they are forced to turn to him for help in a particularly desperate moment. The section of the book where the kids attempt to bait the evil rendering truck into a showdown is among the best things I’ve read in a horror novel in a very long time. And among the well drawn supporting characters, none stands out better than Cordie Cook, one tough piece of white trash; only tell her that at your peril.

The book is not perfect, one flaw is the villain, whose motivation and objective is never made clear – it’s just an ancient evil that takes possession of those closest to it. But that is a weakness of many, many horror tomes. At least one character, Mink Harper, the town drunk, is brought in at one point to just relate, in great detail, pertinent information from the past to Mike; another trope that many horror writers use. SUMMER OF NIGHT can be described as a slow build, it takes it’s time setting the stage, but it is so well written by Simmons, that I didn’t mind; the chapters are just as long as they need to be, the character POV’s are will established and the sentence structure flows naturally, helped along with a great ear for metaphor and simile.

SUMMER OF NIGHT is often compared to Stephen King’s IT, and it is an apt comparison, but for me, SUMMER might just be the better book. It’s much shorter than King’s work and the story stays within the past, my paperback copy comes in just under 500 pages. It has been a few decades since I read IT, and though the book is one of King’s most popular, I remember it as bloated and indulgent in some parts; all of the contemporary story elements could have been edited out, leaving just the story of the kids in Derry, Maine in the 50’s, and it would have been a better book. And Simmons never lets his young heroes go off the rails like King lets his young protagonists do – I’m talking about that certain scene in the sewers, and if you’ve read King’s book, you know what I mean. One thing IT has over SUMMER is villains; nothing can top Pennywise the Clown.

One last thing, why hasn’t SUMMER OF NIGHT not been made into a movie? Its cast of young characters would be perfect for Stephen Spielberg; would love to have seen what POLTERGEIST era Tobe Hooper could have done with it. Someone in Hollywood has dropped the ball. show less

The last day of school means quite a few things for the small Illinois town of Elm Haven. For most kids, it's the beginning of a well-deserved summer vacation, free from books, tests, and teachers. For the town, it brings the end of an era as the Old Central school will close its doors for the last time. But for a few twelve-year-old boys, it brings an adventure none of them could have ever imagined.

It all begins when Tubby Cooke goes missing on the last day of school. None of the other children sees him leave, though the principal and a few teachers insist that he ran off before the last bell finished echoing through the halls. Duane McBride feels differently. He's always felt that something was odd about the school, and he convinces show more his friends Mike O'Rourke, Jim Harlen, Dale and Lawrence Stewart, and Kevin Grumbacher, that Tubby didn't run away, and that the answer lies somewhere inside Old Central. While the rest of the gang spies around town, Duane tracks the history of the school and finds disturbing information about its past and a mysterious bell. But the trouble has already started: a ghostly soldier with a melting face tries to get at Mike's grandmother; the town's rendering trunk comes to life and seems Hell bent on running the boys down; the darkness beneath beds or in closets or in the far corners of basements appears almost alive; and long muddy furrows begin to appear throughout the town, emanating from Old Central and heading to each of the boys' houses.

Under cover of night, the boys must find a way to stop the darkness that's been set in motion before it consumes them and the town.

"Summer of Night" is the grand adventure we all wanted to take during summer breaks, biking and exploring with friends, but author Dan Simmons twists it into a nightmare that no one could have imagined. It's part mystery, trying to uncover the dark secrets of Old Central and the bell that hangs hidden in the boarded up belfry, and part horror, not only creating a unique monster that seems to be everywhere at once, but it touches on childhood fears of the dark. Lawrence Stewart has a terrible fear of what might be lurking beneath his bed; his brother Dale never did like the dark space behind the boiler in the basement. Simmons' nightmarish creation uses those fears against the boys with some terrifying results.

Imaginative and horrific, just the kind of tale that I enjoy, and once I started, I stayed up into the wee hours of the morning reading, not wanting to put the book down. show less