lark_annex reviewed Summer Sons by Lee Mandelo
cars & boys
5 stars
Content warning Spoils end of act 1 reveal
this book car-pilled me. by which I mean, I'm not someone who appreciates cars or owns a car let alone drag racing? Which in the midsized southern Ontario city I grew up in was for straight boys, racing was, classmates' older brothers with their like, souped-up too-shitty too-expensive honda civics or whatever. You'd hear the engines at night, on the long straight deserted suburban artery across the greenbelt from my house.
But summer sons makes me get what they were after, makes me feel the door in the road a fast stupid car that you, high and drunk, love, and in the passenger seat a stupid high and drunk straight? boy that you maybe also kind of love, opens. It lets me travel a little more gently across a blurred boundary into a different person I could have been.
We all grow to define ourselves against alternate forms of a life, to see other paths as external the self we made. and this book made me feel the thread between "southern gothic" and "southern Ontario gothic", connected to something in me about planning an exit, hoping never to return, only execpt that out there on the highway, past the road into the undergrowth, in the interstitial deserted places you're from, something will always be waiting for your return.
spoilers for an end of act one "twist?"
So this was presented to me as a gay novel and about 100 pages in there's this kind of, reverse-queerbaiting thing that made my jaw drop, which is that the main character Andrew has so far been portrayed as deep in mourning for Eddie, who he describes spending all his time with, and he's desperately missing what it felt to be held and casually touched by the living Eddie, his smell, the two made plans to attend the same grad school together, and whenever anyone tells Andrew sorry for the loss of his "friend" he bristles, because Eddie was more than that, except... the reveal is that no they weren't? What read to me (and to most characters in the novel) as a gay relationship is actually a weird, repressed homosocial bro thing. Andrew sees himself as straight. The next two acts of the novel see Andrew coming to question this aspect of his identity, a process of self-discovery and -disclosure that feels overdue to both the people around him, and the reader. If that sounds a bit trite, I think it is, but also I kind of love it? I'm not sure I've experienced a rug pull quite like this one, in that it subverts an audience expectation only to re-confirm that expectation later. It shouldn't work. and yet I feel like it plays on the expectations of a presumably-mostly-queer audience to create a really interesting unreliable narrator in Andrew. It gives the horror elements of the novel added weight by selling Andrew as someone who is deeply unsettled in his own relation to himself, and in his grief not only for the person he's lost, but for the understanding they might have shared with each other and the life they might have lived.
In the third act, the novel moves away from horror toward supernatural thriller, in that previously atmospheric, tense elements become clues or problems to be solved and explained. There's an answer, and ultimately that's unsatisfying because there's no objective 'answer' to grief. or to the horror of vulnerability to others in a compromised social environment. Instead these emotional dynamics that made the horror work are externalized into a compelling, but ultimately superficial antagonist. Definitely I found the ending the weakest part. the rest is great.
