Summer of Night and A Winter's Haunting
Robert St. Amant
time, back to back, which was kind of fun. I've enjoyed past work by
Dan Simmons, both in horror and science fiction. I think that his
science fiction pieces have more ingenuity and sparkle that his horror
novels, but he delivers solid dread and shivers for the reader. Here
are a few comments on this pair of books, with plenty of *spoilers*.
In Summer of Night you have your plucky group of kids going up against
unspeakable evil, for the most part succeeding despite the odds. The
plot moves along at a steady pace, and there are some nice set pieces,
but Simmons's homage to past work by others makes everything a bit too
predictable. I'd summarize Summer of Night as a good pastiche; in
other words, if you combine Stephen King's It, Ray Bradbury's
Dandelion Wine, and perhaps a book with tunneling, shapeshifting
monsters that can possess people, you have most of Summer of Night.
These connections are probably pretty obvious, but for what it's
worth, here's what caught my eye.
It: There's the group of barely pre-adolescent kids, in 1960,
effectively using their kid weapons, such as squirtguns filled with
holy water, against a monster who near the end of the book is
described as resembling (among other things) a giant spider. You have
all of their backstories as well, including broken homes, lower-middle
versus upper-middle class rivalries, scary or incomprehensible poor
people, and so forth. Not too far afield from King's territory.
Dandelion Wine: The descriptions of kids enjoying the beginning of
summer in a small town in Illinois was strongly suggestive of
Bradbury's piece. Even the kids' calls to one another on Bike Patrol
are oddly similar to to "Waukegan", the town Bradbury grew up in and
apparently fictionalized in his book. There's also the Mink
character, who, while telling a story to one of the kids, asks if the
kid expects him to be some kind of memory machine; in Dandelion Wine,
Douglas et al. viewed one of the older people in town as a kind of
time machine through which they could visit other times through
stories.
Stinger: It's a bit of a stretch to connect Summer of Night to a novel
like Robert McCammon's Stinger, but in both you have immensely strong
monsters that tunnel underground from their lair, attack, kill, and
possess people, and are destroyed by explosions in the end.
Coincidentally, McCammon's novel Boy's Life was published the same
year as Summer of Night, and I think it does a better job overall at
taking on similar themes.
All in all, despite the feeling of familiarity, Summer of Night is
well-written and a relatively satisfying light read.
I had a bit more trouble with A Winter Haunting. Forty years after
their adventures, one of the heroes, Dale, returns to town to rent the
house of one of his childhood friends who died back in 1960. This
novel has a completely different flavor from the first, focusing much
more on the troubles of the adult Dale, who now believes that most or
all of the supernatural events of forty years ago is his imagination.
I won't go into the story details, but I'll note that there are
problems either with sloppy editing or missed opportunities. Two
examples: (1) Dale is told by a local sheriff about one of the events
that happened in 1960, involving one car forcing another off the road,
and leaving streaks of blue paint on its door. One of the most
memorable parts of Summer of Night, however, was a *red* truck that
was chasing them--and as I recall the car driven off the road was at
that time described as having red paint on its side. Is this
deliberate? If the sheriff is lying to Dale, this would put quite a
different spin on his experiences (and later on we do find out that
Dale has been seeing visions or hallucinations), but this point isn't
pursued. (2) Dale seems to lose several weeks of time at one point;
he thinks it is a few days after Thanksgiving, when it is actually a
few days before Christmas. This is not an uncommon occurrence in
traditional ghost stories, but Dale barely seems to notice, and
there's no elaboration of the how or why or the implications of the
occurrence. There are a few other difficulties as well, that have to
do with the point of Michelle's actions, Duane's incredible literacy,
fairly anonymous bad guys, and Dale's convenient lack of memory for
the past events, which makes what should be resonant similarities with
Summer of Night just. . .flat.
What was most dissatisfying about the book, for me, was a sense of
distance between me (the reader) and Dale. For example, we know that
Dale's a writer, and that he's actually a bad writer, and we're even
told why he writes badly---but we're only shown one paragraph from all
the pages that he's apparently working on while in town. Telling
instead of showing is one of the hallmarks of bad writing, and it's
ironic that it appears at a couple of levels here. Simmons further
says that good writing, according to Hemingway, is written from the
inside out, rather than the outside in, but I didn't come away with
the feeling that A Winter Haunting was written from the inside out.
Some of the distance between us and Dale is necessary, because Dale's
not a trustworthy narrator, and it leads to some interesting
ambiguities that aren't resolved in the end (to good effect), but
overall I was just a bit disappointed.
--
Rob St. Amant
http://www4.ncsu.edu/~stamant
J. M. L.
> with plenty of *spoilers*.
>
><summer of night analysis removed>
>
> All in all, despite the feeling of familiarity, Summer of Night is
> well-written and a relatively satisfying light read.
>
> I had a bit more trouble with A Winter Haunting
>
> I won't go into the story details, but I'll note that there are
> problems either with sloppy editing or missed opportunities.
> Dale seems to lose several weeks of time at one point;
I had no problem with this, and in fact, this lost time points to the
climactic revelation at the end. <SPOILERS>
There are a few other difficulties as well, that have to
> do with the point of Michelle's actions, Duane's incredible literacy,
This also plays into the ending.
> fairly anonymous bad guys, and
To each their own. I didn't get this feeling. Considering most of
the "Bad Guys" were revenants, ghosts and hallucinations, I'm not sure
how much characterization one should expect.
> Dale's convenient lack of memory for
> the past events, which makes what should be resonant similarities with
> Summer of Night just. . .flat.
This is one of the problems of reading the books back to back.
Simmons doesn't do sequels in the traditional sense. Look at Hyperion
and Endymion.
In "Winter", Simmons returned the characters and settings... but the
events of "Summer of Night" were treated exactly as the 50 something
year old protagonist would remember them. Hazy, and almost not real.
As the narrator would remember them. I don't think Simmons was
interested in creating resonances between the plot and events., as
much as he was juxtaposing the "Coming of age" form of summer of Night
with the "winter years" narrative of A winter haunting. Simmons has
always been a structuralist playing games with specific types of
narratives structures for a long time. Witness "Hyperion,"
"Endymion," The WWI novella from "Love and Death", and "Fires of
Eden," and "The Crook Factory." All are homage's to very specific
forms/pieces of literature.
Once again, in Winter, Simmons is playing around with classic
literature archtypes in A Winter Haunting. He's mucking about with a
James-ian Ghost story format. But tropes from his mystery writing are
also poking through. He has numerous red hearings as to what is going
on, and what archetype he is playing with. Anybody else get the
"Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" feeling that the events of the book
were all taking place in the narrators mind, after his "failed"
suicide attempt?
<Major major major spoilers>
The Lost time, and Duane's incredible depth and breadth of knowledge
point to 1 of two things:
1) Duane is a ghost, who has been living with the Dale for the last 40
years. He went to college and lived his life through Dale. He
learned all the things Dale learned. etc etc. At the end of the book,
Duane has "taken over" and is now living in Dales body. This would
account for the lost time.
2) The Traumas of the events of the first book caused dale to
develope multiple personality disorder. "Duane" is his split. This
would definitely account for lost time. He's been taking medication.
He's been depressed. He's not right in the head. Coming home brings
about the emergence of "Duane" as the dominate personality. And the
hallucinations and stuff are the way "Dale" perceived the conflict
between his two personalities.
The truth is probably somewhere in between, or a combination of these
things.
>
> What was most dissatisfying about the book, for me, was a sense of
> distance between me (the reader) and Dale. For example, we know that
> Dale's a writer, and that he's actually a bad writer, and we're even
> told why he writes badly---but we're only shown one paragraph from all
> the pages that he's apparently working on while in town. Telling
> instead of showing is one of the hallmarks of bad writing, and it's
> ironic that it appears at a couple of levels here.
It seems that Simmons was perhaps "Showing" something completely
different here... We never really got to know dale, because Dale
never really new himself... You mention the unreliable narrator
further down in your post. Perhaps this is a way Simmons is "Showing"
us this unreliability. Or perhaps it is, like you suggest, just bad
writing.
> Simmons further
> says that good writing, according to Hemingway, is written from the
> inside out, rather than the outside in, but I didn't come away with
> the feeling that A Winter Haunting was written from the inside out.
> Some of the distance between us and Dale is necessary, because Dale's
> not a trustworthy narrator, and it leads to some interesting
> ambiguities that aren't resolved in the end (to good effect), but
> overall I was just a bit disappointed.
I can definitely see how you would be disappointed after just reading
summer of night. However, I had read summer of night some years
before (10, I believe) and had exactly the kind of vague, idealized
memories of the events of "Summer" that Dale had. The Trick of having
the "Duane" narrator commenting on the fuzziness of Dales memories of
that summer made me feel closer to the original material than I
actually was, and made a recent reading of summer completely
unnecessary.
This is why I suggested at the beginning that Simmons doesn't do
sequels. The events of the first book are the vague memories of a
character in "Winter." Much the same way the events of Hyperion were
distant, historical events to the people of Endymion. There is a
connection there. But not in the traditional sense of a sequel.
If you look at published novel "Summer" as the idealized, corrupted
version of the events as written by the 50 year old Dale/Duane of
"winter", the two books compliment each other very well. Read back to
back, though, they do suffer from un-met reader expectations.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on these two novels. I've been
contemplating "Winter" on and off for the last 4 months, since I
finished reading it, and its nice to have someone to "talk" to about
it.
-JML
Robert St. Amant
Thanks for your commentary! It's cleared up some of the questions I
had about A Winter Haunting, and given me a better appreciation for
the book. Reading over my first post, I see I concentrated too much
on plot, and neglected some other important aspects of the books, such
as the ones you mention. More comments interspersed below.
> sta...@haeckel.csc.ncsu.edu (Robert St. Amant) wrote in message news:<lpnbs8q...@haeckel.csc.ncsu.edu>...
> > with plenty of *spoilers*.
> >
> ><summer of night analysis removed>
> >
> > All in all, despite the feeling of familiarity, Summer of Night is
> > well-written and a relatively satisfying light read.
> >
> > I had a bit more trouble with A Winter Haunting
> <Winter Haunting summary deleted>
> >
> > I won't go into the story details, but I'll note that there are
> > problems either with sloppy editing or missed opportunities.
>
> > Dale seems to lose several weeks of time at one point;
>
>
> I had no problem with this, and in fact, this lost time points to the
> climactic revelation at the end. <SPOILERS>
>
> There are a few other difficulties as well, that have to
> > do with the point of Michelle's actions, Duane's incredible literacy,
>
> This also plays into the ending.
>
>
> > fairly anonymous bad guys, and
> To each their own. I didn't get this feeling. Considering most of
> the "Bad Guys" were revenants, ghosts and hallucinations, I'm not sure
> how much characterization one should expect.
I was thinking about the neo-Nazis in particular. After reading the
rest of your post, though, I realized that Simmons is playing an
interesting game with them, in that at a couple of points, such as
when they all disappear after the car chase, I wondered whether they
were real at all, which in turn made me wonder whether *any* of what
was happening was real.
> > Dale's convenient lack of memory for
> > the past events, which makes what should be resonant similarities with
> > Summer of Night just. . .flat.
>
> This is one of the problems of reading the books back to back.
> Simmons doesn't do sequels in the traditional sense. Look at Hyperion
> and Endymion.
>
> In "Winter", Simmons returned the characters and settings... but the
> events of "Summer of Night" were treated exactly as the 50 something
> year old protagonist would remember them. Hazy, and almost not real.
> As the narrator would remember them. I don't think Simmons was
> interested in creating resonances between the plot and events., as
> much as he was juxtaposing the "Coming of age" form of summer of Night
> with the "winter years" narrative of A winter haunting. Simmons has
> always been a structuralist playing games with specific types of
> narratives structures for a long time. Witness "Hyperion,"
> "Endymion," The WWI novella from "Love and Death", and "Fires of
> Eden," and "The Crook Factory." All are homage's to very specific
> forms/pieces of literature.
That's a nice observation, that the contrasts between Summer and
Winter reflects most obviously the change in seasons but also Dale's
aging and the difference between the present day and what we can infer
to be his rose-colored view of the past. (Although I didn't get this
until you mentioned it.)
BTW, I was impressed by Hyperion, and its classical references. I
thought that Endymion was less ambitious but I enjoyed it just as
much. I haven't read that much Simmons, though, just those four
books, Carrion Comfort, and The Hollow Man, so I probably wasn't
prepared for A Winter Haunting as well as I might have been.
> Once again, in Winter, Simmons is playing around with classic
> literature archtypes in A Winter Haunting. He's mucking about with a
> James-ian Ghost story format. But tropes from his mystery writing are
> also poking through. He has numerous red hearings as to what is going
> on, and what archetype he is playing with. Anybody else get the
> "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" feeling that the events of the book
> were all taking place in the narrators mind, after his "failed"
> suicide attempt?
Yes, definitely. Each time he found the *the* bullet, I wondered
whether we'd be swept back to the event of his actual, "successful"
suicide.
> <Major major major spoilers>
>
> The Lost time, and Duane's incredible depth and breadth of knowledge
> point to 1 of two things:
>
> 1) Duane is a ghost, who has been living with the Dale for the last 40
> years. He went to college and lived his life through Dale. He
> learned all the things Dale learned. etc etc. At the end of the book,
> Duane has "taken over" and is now living in Dales body. This would
> account for the lost time.
>
> 2) The Traumas of the events of the first book caused dale to
> develope multiple personality disorder. "Duane" is his split. This
> would definitely account for lost time. He's been taking medication.
> He's been depressed. He's not right in the head. Coming home brings
> about the emergence of "Duane" as the dominate personality. And the
> hallucinations and stuff are the way "Dale" perceived the conflict
> between his two personalities.
>
> The truth is probably somewhere in between, or a combination of these
> things.
Those interpretations explain quite a bit. I'd considered the first
but not the second, and hadn't linked either to the lost time. Now
that you describe the situation, though, I realize that it should have
been obvious, especially in the roundabout way that Dale can only
communicate with Duane through the computer when he's not in the room
focusing on the machine. It's only when he goes off and does
something else that Duane can do anything. . . Dale must be losing
time right and left.
Your interpretation may also explain some of what I was thinking of as
inconsistencies between Summer and Winter. If Dale is learning or
remembering things through Duane, there are bound to be mixups because
of the difficulty Duane has in communicating with Dale.
> > What was most dissatisfying about the book, for me, was a sense of
> > distance between me (the reader) and Dale. For example, we know that
> > Dale's a writer, and that he's actually a bad writer, and we're even
> > told why he writes badly---but we're only shown one paragraph from all
> > the pages that he's apparently working on while in town. Telling
> > instead of showing is one of the hallmarks of bad writing, and it's
> > ironic that it appears at a couple of levels here.
>
> It seems that Simmons was perhaps "Showing" something completely
> different here... We never really got to know dale, because Dale
> never really new himself... You mention the unreliable narrator
> further down in your post. Perhaps this is a way Simmons is "Showing"
> us this unreliability. Or perhaps it is, like you suggest, just bad
> writing.
Well, what you've written has persuaded me that there's much more to
it than I'd originally thought.
You're suggesting that Summer of Night was the book that Dale
eventually wrote? Very interesting. That occurred to me too as I was
reading Winter, but just in passing, but the cues weren't strong
enough for me to follow up on the idea. Although that would explain
why we don't see much of Dale's writing in Winter; we've already read
it as Summer. (And if this is true, then Simmons is being
self-deprecating in calling Dale a bad writer, since of course it's
his own book he'd be slamming.)
Maybe I should wait a bit, and give Winter another read, because that
could change my view of the book quite a bit. You're probably right
that I was carried away by the relative simplicity and innocence of
the characters in Summer, and expected some of that to be carried over
into Winter. Now that I think about it, though, Simmons does try to
alter our expectations right at the start, telling us that Mike was
wounded badly in Viet Nam, that Lawrence has become an insurance
salesman instead of a baseball player, and that he and Dale and the
rest barely even write letters to each other anymore. Plus there's
the transformation of Michelle into Mica. Those should have been
obvious indications that the tone and general approach would be
different.
> Thanks for sharing your thoughts on these two novels. I've been
> contemplating "Winter" on and off for the last 4 months, since I
> finished reading it, and its nice to have someone to "talk" to about
> it.
Very interesting thoughts! Thanks. You've made me think harder about
the books, and they've become a lot more interesting.
Any comment on how Michelle fits into the story, thematically? I
couldn't figure out what her motivations were, even as a ghost, beyond
being a general temptation. The explanation for the room's effect on
Dale was interesting as another unpleasant contrast to a scene in
Summer, but I thought it was a little bit pat, and too abrupt. It may
be just another thing I'd missed the significance of, though.
Animal Hour
>version of the events as written by the 50 year old Dale/Duane of
>"winter",
No, "Summer of Night" is the full story as someone like Duane would have
written it.
Dale left out the supernatural bits and the bullies. Dale's version was
idealized, but the actual Simmons novel SoN is not.
Animal Hour
>eventually wrote?
> Very interesting. That occurred to me too as I was
>reading Winter, but just in passing, but the cues weren't strong
>enough for me to follow up on the idea. Although that would explain
>why we don't see much of Dale's writing in Winter; we've already read
>it as Summer.
>(And if this is true, then Simmons is being
>self-deprecating in calling Dale a bad writer, since of course it's
>his own book he'd be slamming.)
Duane may have controlled Dale during the writing after "Winter" ended, and
Duane McBride was talented (at least he thought he was).
I don't like the idea of SoN as a novel within a novel though. A Winter
Haunting is set in 2001, but Summer of Night was out in 1991. How could Duane
write a book in 2001-02 that I already read in 1991?
Robert St. Amant
> >You're suggesting that Summer of Night was the book that Dale
> >eventually wrote?
>
> > Very interesting. That occurred to me too as I was
> >reading Winter, but just in passing, but the cues weren't strong
> >enough for me to follow up on the idea. Although that would explain
> >why we don't see much of Dale's writing in Winter; we've already read
> >it as Summer.
>
> >(And if this is true, then Simmons is being
> >self-deprecating in calling Dale a bad writer, since of course it's
> >his own book he'd be slamming.)
>
> Duane may have controlled Dale during the writing after "Winter" ended, and
> Duane McBride was talented (at least he thought he was).
That's true, and Duane had eventually wanted to become a novelist in
Summer.
> I don't like the idea of SoN as a novel within a novel though. A Winter
> Haunting is set in 2001, but Summer of Night was out in 1991. How could Duane
> write a book in 2001-02 that I already read in 1991?
It is a stretch in some ways, if we're talking about reality :-)