Andrew held the clutch and eased onto the gas, pushing revs while the digital readout reminded him to hold it, wait for the right moment to explode. Sam’s fingers touched the rim of the moon hanging in the sky. A shudder ripped across the bones of Andrew’s forearms, terror and delight and the promise of risk bringing him to life.
― Lee Mandelo, Summer SonsFor fuck’s sake Andrew. Is there anything in this scenario that feels heterosexual or well-adjusted to you?
― Lee Mandelo, Summer Sons
Andrew’s arrival in Nashville was not at all as he’d imagined it. Days before he was due to join his best friend Eddie for graduate school, Eddie’s body was found in the nearby forest, wrists slit. Andrew’s mission is to find out what Eddie had been up to and to prove that Eddie did not kill himself. The Eddie he knew would never do something like that. In the eight months they’d spent apart, Andrew waiting patiently for the word from Eddie, something monumental had changed.
Almost immediately, Andrew falls into the life Eddie prepared for him. He takes his designated spot in Eddie’s house, takes over Eddie’s muscle car, and begins his graduate program at Vanderbilt. His inherited roommate Riley, a local, is in the same program as Andrew: American studies with a focus on Appalachian folk stories and traditions. Or, as Andrew puts it, “Eddie’s southern gothics.”
As teenagers, Eddie and Andrew experienced a haunting that bonded them for life. Andrew refused to speak about it while Eddie dug deeper to understand it. Closer to his ancestral home near Nashville, Eddie left Andrew up in Ohio so he could do some digging on his own and find out more about their supernatural experience. But now Eddie is dead and Andrew has an ever-growing list of suspects, not the least of which includes his new roommate Riley, Riley’s volatile, charming cousin Sam, and their pack of street racers.
Sometimes I put off writing a review because I can’t think of anything new to say. In the case of this book, I have too much to say. In summary, I loved it. I finished it two days ago and I’m itching to start a reread already.
This book ticks all of my boxes, which apparently include hauntings and curses set in the sweaty, stifling forests and hills of the American south, race cars, dangerous boys with dangerous vices, fistfights, toxic relationships, and enough homoerotic tension and self-flagellation to fill the gas tanks of three hundred Dodge Challengers.
It reminds me of the best parts of my beloved Raven Boys: found family, southern culture, dark academia, haunted forests, and gay awakening. But it is volatile and dangerous like the All For The Game series. I love both of these series for different reasons, and Summer Sons takes both of them and blends them into the perfect southern gothic ghost story powered by burned rubber, gasoline, family curses, frequent and flagrant recreational drug use, and pure, uncut repressed feelings.
This book is far from perfect. The first third is slow. Andrew is not a sympathetic protagonist. The plot goes nowhere for a long time. But the vibes….the vibes are incredible.
Content warnings include the mention of suicide, drug use, drunk driving, fistfights, and gay slurs.
