Summer Sons

Lee Mandelo’s Summer Sons is a strange mix of contradictory and unlikely inspirations that don't quite meld together into a seamless whole: portions of the novel feel like "dark academia" for grown-ups, there are many sequences of shit-kickin' country boys drag racing, and a Southern Gothic ghost tale looms everywhere in the background, unable to make itself fully heard over the roar of the high-toned engines.

Andrew Blur has inherited a lot from his best friend-slash-brother after his apparent suicide: a graduate research project on ghostly Southern folklore, a new set of wild and potentially dangerous friends, a crushing sense of loneliness, and a self-imposed duty to discover why and how his friend actually died.

The academic bits felt the most “off” and nebulously rendered to me; perhaps due to my own experiences, I have an unduly difficult time imagining mentors and professors responding to messages near-instantaneously. Even so, the descriptions of the usual academic issues with thesis committees, plagiarism, and the petty clash of egos were enough to tap into some deep-seated anxieties of my own, so perhaps that element does work in the context of a horror novel. 

Things do come together into a satisfying conclusion by the end of the novel, even if the villains in this whodunit were obvious and the protagonist could have saved himself a lot of grief by being honest with himself much earlier in life. Though Lee Mandelo's Summer Sons isn't a perfect novel, it is a really impressive debut and a worthy addition to the corpus of the Queer Gothic.