Summer of night (1991)
Summer of night is a 1991 horror book written by Dan Simmons.
Elm Haven, Illinois, the summer of 1960: bikes, creek beds, free movie nights on the town square, and eleven weeks of freedom stretching out from the last day of school. Five twelve-year-old boys mean to spend it the usual way. Then their classmate Tubby Cooke vanishes inside Old Central School, and the boys start noticing things: holes opening in the ground, a rendering-plant truck that idles outside their houses, a soldier from the wrong war standing at the edge of a field. Something old is working under the town, the adults refuse to see it, and the kids are on their own.
Quick answers
What is Summer of night about?
Elm Haven, Illinois, the summer of 1960: bikes, creek beds, free movie nights on the town square, and eleven weeks of freedom stretching out from the last day of school. Five twelve-year-old boys mean to spend it the usual way. Then their classmate Tubby Cooke vanishes inside Old Central School, and the boys start noticing things: holes opening in the ground, a rendering-plant truck that idles outside their houses, a soldier from the wrong war standing at the edge of a field. Something old is working under the town, the adults refuse to see it, and the kids are on their own.
When was Summer of night published?
Summer of night was published in 1991.
Who made Summer of night?
Summer of night was written by Dan Simmons.
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Summer of night in our writing
- Companion guide: Hyperion Cantos: The Complete Guide to Dan Simmons' Far-Future Epic
A few thoughts on Summer of night
The DNA of Stranger Things is all over this book, or rather the reverse: a bike gang, a haunted small town, an evil the grown-ups will not acknowledge. Rob Reiner's Stand by Me captures the same aching boyhood nostalgia without the monster, and Andy Muschietti's It is this novel's closest cinematic cousin.
Small towns with something ancient buried under them
Summer of Night sends five boys after a missing classmate and into a town where something old has been working under Elm Haven for a lot longer than anyone admits. These share the same setup: kids who notice the cracks first, a curse that outlasts a single victim, and adults who would rather look away than believe what the children already know.
Manga where an ordinary place quietly turns monstrous
Elm Haven in Summer of Night decays from the inside, a curse spreading through the town the way it spreads through these: a spiral pattern that infects everyone who looks too closely, parasites replacing their hosts one neighbor at a time, ghouls hiding behind ordinary faces, and a world where the rules themselves have gone wrong underneath a familiar surface.