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. 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. 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. 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.
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. 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. 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. The novel begins where all coming-of-age horror stories probably should: the first day of summer vacation. 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 summer lies ahead like a great banquet and the days are filled with rich, slow time in which to enjoy each course.”ĭan 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. “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.
(This review has a clearly marked spoiler wall.)
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