The Summer that Melted Everything

This is the book that melted me. It's a deeply powerful work of wonderful prose that reads like poetry, telling a story that hits the reader like a runaway train.

In the summer of 1984 a man posts an ad in the local newspaper, inviting the devil to speak with him. Soon after that a ragged 13 year old boy wanders into the town and is met by that man's 13 year old son. The stranger has that newspaper and says he's come to answer the invitation. "Come and I'll take you to my father" says the local boy. And so begins a new friendship and the dissolution of everything in a town too small to contain the trouble.

The narrator is the local boy grown old and is now 71. The voice swaps seamlessly between his old and young self, sometimes with a change of chapter, sometimes with a new paragraph. The old man still carries the events of his younger self and knows he will die with his memories, and perhaps even die from them.

The book is a Russian matryoshka doll of metaphors, each one revealing the next one within, as McDaniel unfolds all the sins of mankind under the influence of this one unknown boy. Her poetic prose fires the narration to a hard glaze as the story takes us deeper into levels of bigotry, abuse, discrimination, love and loss, friendship and betrayal, of people torn apart even from their inner selves.

And at the end the whole thing explodes as the impossible is demanded of each of these two boys, their family, and the town. And as the explosion clears we see the wisps of those that are left as they wander into whatever future they can each make for themselves.

This is the book that melted me. It's a deeply powerful work of wonderful prose that reads like poetry, telling a story that hits the reader like a runaway train.

In the summer of 1984 a man posts an ad in the local newspaper, inviting the devil to speak with him. Soon after that a ragged 13 year old boy wanders into the town and is met by that man's 13 year old son. The stranger has that newspaper and says he's come to answer the invitation. "Come and I'll take you to my father" says the local boy. And so begins a new friendship and the dissolution of everything in a town too small to contain the trouble.

The narrator is the local boy grown old and is now 71. The voice swaps seamlessly between his old and young self, sometimes with a change of chapter, sometimes with a new paragraph. The old man still carries the events of his younger self and knows he will die with his memories, and perhaps even die from them.

The stranger speaks of things he could not normally know and has a wisdom that is beyond 13 year old boys - such things as "that behavior is not inflammable. People do not burn in hell for that reason by itself." Such sayings make the local boy think that perhaps this new friend who now lives with his family really is the devil after all.

The book is a Russian matryoshka doll of metaphors, each one revealing the next one within, as McDaniel unfolds all the sins of mankind under the influence of this one unknown boy. Her poetic prose fires the narration to a hard glaze as the story takes us deeper into levels of bigotry, abuse, discrimination, love and loss, friendship and betrayal, of rising paranoia and of people torn apart even from their inner selves.

And at the end the whole thing explodes as the impossible is demanded of each of these two boys, their family, and the town. And as the explosion clears we see the wisps of those that are left as they wander into whatever future they can each make for themselves.