Summer Sons: The Haunting of Queer Longing

When you don't get to grow up as yourself, there are ghosts everywhere.

Note: There are ABSOLUTELY spoilers. Big ones. You've been warned.

I used to love reading more than anything, but I find it harder and harder to carve out time for it among all the other expectations of life. I decided to start a new section to this site to record my thoughts about the books I finish: good, bad, or indifferent. I'm not sure how often I'll be able to update this, but let's give it a shot. Welcome to my bookshelf.

Lee Mandelo's Summer Sons is a ghost story. It's about old southern families, the specter of slavery, the dusty library shelves filled with dead author's words in the halls of academia. But there are other ghosts, more personal ghosts. Love can be a ghost; it can haunt us, it can destroy us, and it can save us. Perhaps all three at the same time.

I had a hard time getting into this book. A little more than the first half felt like a bit of a slog, but there were enough hooks (and my completionist instincts) to keep me going, and I'm glad that I did. The witchcraft and the spirits are well done, and it's a fun romp for horror fans, but what pushed me to the last page was the story of unspoken queer longing.

Hard to believe, but I was young once, and I remember those early days when I had just come to terms with my identity, and even the nervous fumblings before I knew who I was. Queerness haunted me. It was a threat before I came out, a secret I didn't even know about myself, but that everyone else seemed to be aware of. As I was coming out, it haunted me as I tried to figure out who I was. And it haunts me still, this thing that shapes and defines me, leaving me with questions about how my life might have turned out if this ghost hadn't been lurking over my shoulder. I'm old enough now to realize that I'm all the better for it.

Andrew is searching for answers about his friend/adoptive brother/secret lover's (?) apparent suicide in Nashville. Eddie had gone ahead to Vanderbilt, insisting that Andrew stay behind up north. Tennessee was the site of some long-ago trauma that takes about half the book to be revealed, and returning there is fraught for Andrew for many reasons.

My confusion was stoked because the early parts of the book are written as if Andrew and Eddie were lovers, that this was an established piece of their history. As Andrew moves to Nashville, and starts moving in Eddie's circle, more is revealed and it turns out that Andrew and Eddie shared a bond that no one, including them, fully understood. It turned from what seemed to be a mourning lover's search for answers into something closeted, something stunted, haunted by desire by never realized.

Andrew's friend Del is in the narrative from the beginning, and it's slowly revealed that the three of them had been in some sort of fledgling throuple situation; Del was the only one who seemed to realize that she was just a conduit for these two men who couldn't speak their desires into reality.

As Andrew is navigating this new world, it's revealed that he and Eddie shared a bond since childhood where they were able to connect to some supernatural connection to death. Now that Eddie is gone, the revenant that has been with him since their shared trauma is not only intensifying, it is reaching out to him through the spirit of Eddie, revealing that his adopted brother's death is more complicated than it seems.

The last third of the novel grabbed in ways that the earlier sections could not. I understand the need to build a mystery, to set up characters, to build in red herrings to keep the reader guessing, but the dark connotations of Eddie's research at Vanderbilt (as well as his questionable relationship with his dissertation advisor Jane Troth) are both obvious and painfully ignored for too much of the narrative. Some of the twists in the back quarter of the book are a little too easy to spot, but Mandelo does a good job of making them exciting to read even when you can guess what's coming.

And I'm glad that, although we are left with the unrequited love between Andrew and Eddie, that at least Andrew gets not only a solid validation that there was unspoken love between the two of them, but also a physical connection with someone that helps him some to terms with his emerging queerness.

There is a lot of weird 3way stuff in the book that repeats among multiple sets of characters. I get that it comes up for Andrew, Eddie, and Del, and it's a way to introduce the complexities of their love/not love relationship, but the repetition feels a little forced. Almost like someone had taken a queer theory class and really latched onto the homoscial bonds explored in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's work and decided "I'm going to really do something with that!"

What I found most effective was the way that a trans character was incorporated into the narrative. It was never a problem to be solved, it was never a teachable moment. This character just existed in the story and had full, human relationships with all the characters who dropped in well-crafted "blink and you miss it" references to explain the character's history. No one ever has to sit down and have "the talk." If a film was made, this would be one of those things, like Rue being black in The Hunger Games, that less astute readers would attribute to "wokeness" when it was clearly there the whole time.

I think more could have been done with some of the supernatural elements to flesh them out. There is a whole street racing culture that is part of the narrative that is detailed and flavorful, but doesn't really have any impact on the trajectory of the story, so I think it could have been cut down a bit to make room for more of the witchy elements that get neglected. The academic elements felt very familiar from my own time in grad school, and I think there was more there that went unmined as well, but overall it's a satisfying ghost story that pays off...if you don't give up on it in the early chapters.