The Summer That Melted Everything by Tiffany McDaniel review – a very overheated tale

Tiffany McDaniel’s debut sees a satanic presence turn up in small-town America and apparently unleash chaos; a familiar idea to anyone who has watched the TV series Fargo. But there are important differences – as the title suggests, The Summer That Melted Everything is takes place in the hot season in Ohio, rather than Fargo’s wintry setting. More crucially, McDaniel’s novel doesn’t have the warped charisma of Billy Bob Thornton to pull you through when things get a bit silly. And because McDaniel’s book starts getting silly in its first paragraph, that’s a big problem.

Here is the initial offending item:

The heat came with the devil. It was the summer of 1984, and while the devil had been invited, the heat had not. It should’ve been expected though. Heat is, after all, the devil’s name, and when’s the last time you left home without yours?

Without my what now? My hot name? My devil? And how is heat the devil’s name? The invitation, at least, gets an explanation. The narrator’s father Autopsy Bliss (just roll with the name, the author admits its “acutely strange”) has published a letter in the local newspaper The Breathanian, asking the devil to come and see him. Soon a young boy calling himself Sal appears claiming (for reasons never satisfactorily explained) to be Old Nick himself. This claim excites the town – especially when unfortunate accidents begin to happen.

It isn’t a spoiler to say that the story is heading for tragedy, not least because the narrative comes from the point of view of Fielding Bliss, Autopsy’s son and one of the main witnesses to the events. He’s in a bad way as he tells the story, and frequently explains that he’s messed up because of the past. Seventy-one years ago, in fact, which means a good part of the novel is set in 2055 – although you wouldn’t really know because there is such little description in these parts. It also feels odd that the past-tense sections of the novel are set in 1984. Sure, there a few clunking references to Rambo, Ghostbusters and other early 80s benchmarks, but really this evocation of small-town life feels more like reheated Harper Lee than anything from the Reagan years.

Like Lee, McDaniel takes on serious questions of race, as well as sexuality and child abuse. But sadly, things are more Go Set a Watchman than To Kill a Mockingbird: unsubtle and overeager. There’s no doubting McDaniel’s sincerity or good intentions, but alas, all three issues are dumped too heavily into a narrative that can’t bear their weight.

Similarly, I wouldn’t want to fault McDaniel for ambition. Her prose is full of allusion and brave attempts at interesting metaphors. She aims for good sentences – and sometimes gets close:

What I’ve just described is the town of my heart, not necessarily the town itself, which had an underbelly that knew how to be of a mood with the mud. Just as in every other small town and big city, the women cried and the men knew how to shout. Dogs were beat, children too. There weren’t always mothers to bloom identical to the rose, and more often than not, there was no picket fence to paint.

But for the jangling repetitions of “knew” and “town”, those sentences would sound quite pleasant. But for the questions of exactly what mood mud tends to be in, and what it would mean for mothers to “bloom identical” to roses, it would be quite evocative. Like so much of the book, it feels a little too strained and not quite sharp enough.

As the story boils over into never fully explained cult craziness, emotion-exploiting self-harm and a quite ridiculous body count, the silliness becomes all-encompassing. There are flickers of promise, and a few fine sentences. But not enough to prevent The Summer That Melted Everything feeling overheated, overworked and overwrought.

• The Summer That Melted Everything is published by Scribe Publications at £14.99 and is available from the Guardian Bookshop for £12.29.