Let The Boys of Summer Warm Up Your September
Debi Moore
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Netflix’s “Stranger Things” has only been out for a short while, but it’s obviously a smashing success. If you’re a fan of the show’s formula – supernatural suspense and ’80s nostalgia – who is looking for something to read this fall, then you might want to keep Richard Cox’s upcoming The Boys of Summer on your radar.
The Boys of Summer: A Novel, arriving from Night Shade Books on September 6th, is a character-driven, deeply affecting work that blends small-town Americana adolescence with speculative elements to create a unique setting and world. Cox pivots effortlessly between the two time periods of 1979 and 2008 in this stunning supernatural thriller.
Contextually in the same vein as It by Stephen King, A Fine Dark Line by Joe Lansdale, Boy’s Life by Robert McCammon, A Winter Haunting by Dan Simmons, The Shadow Year by Jeffrey Ford, and the Duffer Brothers’ “Stranger Things,” a group of friends face the horrors of the past together. The Boys of Summer is a dark coming-of-age novel set in the Deep South, where Richard Cox expertly recasts the boundaries of possibility after a natural disaster wreaks havoc and leaves a terrible secret in its wake.
Synopsis:
In 1979, a massive tornado devastates the city of Wichita Falls, Texas, leaving scores dead, thousands homeless, and nine-year-old Todd Willis in a coma, fighting for his life. Four years later, Todd awakens to a world that looks the same but feels different in a way he can’t quite grasp. For Todd, it’s a struggle to separate fact from fiction as he battles lingering hallucinations from his long sleep.
The new friends Todd makes in 1983 are fascinated with his experience and become mesmerized by his strange relationship with the world. Together the five boys come of age during a dark, fiery summer where they find first love, betrayal, and a secret so terrible they agree to never speak of it again.
But darkness returns to Wichita Falls twenty-five years later, and the boys—now men—are forced to reunite and confront the wounds from their past. When their memories of that childhood summer refuse to align with reality, the friends embark upon a search for truth that will threaten their lives, and transform their understanding of each other—and the world itself—forever.
Categorized:News
