jdavidhacker1 reviewed Summer of night by Dan Simmons
None
2 stars
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.returnThis 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.returnBesides the aforementioned anachronistic problems with setting, there are a variety of flaws here. The pacing is not just …
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.returnThis 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.returnBesides 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.returnI 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.returnWhat 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.returnI 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.
