Summer of Night

Finally accepting that this goes in my DNF pile.

If you want a spooky, nostalgic adventure by a pack of generic white tween boys on their bikes, just go read some Bradbury. He does it way better, and while poetic is infinitely more concise.

If you want a non-supernatural nostalgic adventure by a pack of distinctive white tween boys, just go read “The Body” or watch Stand by Me.

If you want a spooky, nostalgic adventure by a pack of tween misfits (including a girl and an African American boy) who are all well-drawn and distinctive characters, just go read IT. Try to ignore the SUPER WEIRD and uncomfortable event at the, uh, climax that I still don't understand King getting away with. The rest of the story is pure gold.

My recommendation is not to bother with this one. Why?

- The characters are dull and largely interchangeable. The closest it comes to painting unique characters is designating The Smart Kid, The Dumb Oaf, The Little Brother, The Catholic One, and so on. Even though the Smart Kid was the most interesting, I found myself constantly confusing him with the main character (who has no discernible personality traits) because they have similar names.

- It's not scary. The story meanders a lot, with long stretches of gee-whiz nostalgia punctuated with sudden interpolations of horror cliche set pieces. Things that should have had me squirming were dulled because they're secondary to the lengthy naturalistic backstory. They pop up and then are forgotten in favor of something ludicrously mundane. Moreover, the horror is neither left mysterious enough to be scary nor explained well enough to be satisfying. We're left in the completely bland place between, where one starts to ask questions like, “Are the ghouls just trying to gaslight these kids?” “Why do these supernatural creatures attack in broad daylight but then hide when a grownup comes around?” “Seriously? It's an evil . . . bell?”

- It's annoyingly sexist. The female characters are present enough around the fringes of the story to create a misogynistic undertone absent from the Bradbury and King stories where the main characters simply don't have girls on their radar. When one boy mentally reviles his mother for being an irresponsible slut of a bad mom, it's not super clear if the author means to show the boy in a bad light, or agrees with his assessment. The Bev-analog has no point of view and serves only as a sex object on the bare periphery of the story. It's made more frustrating by a tantalizing aside painting Mike's grandmother as a badass, complex character whom I'd much rather read about. But within the current story, she's literally mute and paralyzed.

This was disappointing. I really, really tried to like it. But now I just get more annoyed the more I read, so better to stop.