Tordotcom / September 2021
Reviewed by: Vince A. Liaguno
Body horror, car culture, masculinity, and queer yearning are the key ingredients of Summer Sons, Lee Mandelo’s ambitious debut novel. In what’s ultimately a deceptively keen exploration of grief and longing set in Appalachian academia, Summer Sons is part ghost story, part academic intrigue, and part coming of age story saturated with a heavy coat of southern gothic.
As the novel opens, twenty-something Andrew Blur has just arrived at graduate school in Nashville, Tennessee, where he was to join his best friend and adoptive brother, Eddie Fulton. Sadly, Eddie is dead—the victim of an apparent suicide—and Andrew is left to navigate an inheritance that includes Eddie’s fortune, which comes complete with a roommate and circle of hyper-masculine, drag-racing aficionados and sometimes drug dealers, as well as a paranormal research project at Vanderbilt’s graduate program. Oh, and the body-melding specter of his deceased best friend.
As Andrew reluctantly steers through the life Eddie left for him, he becomes convinced that Eddie’s death was no suicide and sets out to uncover the truth. This leads him to delve head-first into his friend’s American Studies graduate research project on Appalachian folklore—a smokescreen, Andrew uncovers, to pursue answers about the cursed Fulton family legacy. Matters are complicated by missing notes and a curiously invested thesis supervisor, as well as Andrew’s reluctant immersion into Eddie’s circle of friends, most notably roommate Riley and his cousin, Sam. In the end, it all comes down to legacy—those we create and those we inherit—and Mandelo masterfully brings their slow-burn of a narrative to a (mostly) satisfying conclusion.
Mandelo gives readers a lot to unpack in Summer Sons; there’s the cutthroat world of academia (here laced with a bit of institutional racism), the fluidity of sexual orientation, and an exploration of masculinity. Mandelo’s examination of the latter borders on the fetishistic, with a hyper-awareness of their male character’s bodies that enriches the book’s atmosphere of humidity and sultriness. The effect can be both unsettling and rousing, at times lending itself to a queer fever dream. Summer Sons really shines in its juxtaposition of the old-money elitism of its academic setting against the rural Appalachian elements. The contradiction of these two worlds mirrors those of Andrew, who’s trying to navigate both through the fog of the grief process.
With Summer Sons, Lee Mandelo has crafted a horror novel that builds—admittedly, frustratingly slow at first—to an affecting and thought-provoking conclusion. Patient readers will be rewarded ten-fold for sticking with Andrew through his early meandering. Mandelo recompenses handsomely with beautifully wrought relationships that seem to grow organically off the page, an escalating sense of tension that—once it kicks in—propels the narrative at high-octane speed, and a fully realized tale with just enough room to leave you thinking about the characters and their futures long after you close the book.
Purchase Summer Sons by Lee Mandelo here.