The Summer That Melted Everything by Tiffany McDaniel Review

FUCKING HORRIBLE. That’s the only way to describe Tiffany McDaniel’s The Summer That Melted Everything! 

My head aches just thinking about this garbage… it’s about a Southern kid in the 1980s who meets another kid called Sal who claims to be the Devil (the first two letters from Satan and the first letter of Lucifer = SAL. Faceplant). Southern summers are mighty hot. To make this seem like an intelligent novel, here are some quotes from Paradise Lost ‘cos Sal is a sort of sad and tragic Devil like John Milton’s Satan. That’s it.

That the book has a premise rather than a story bothered me but not nearly as much as McDaniel’s ultra-shitty writing style which tried my patience to the point where I had to abandon the novel for my own sanity at Chapter 16 rather than endure another monotonous 11 chapters. Not a fucking thing can just happen in this book – nobody can simply walk into a room, everything has to be accompanied with a ton of preamble and pretence as well. 

The structure is basically this: begin with folksy wittering about nothing relevant, mention the setting or weather and make a contrived metaphor. Then have a character say something pointless, do a simple thing - the point of all this nonsense - make another strained metaphor or maybe a time-wasting simile, then end with a useless anecdote about nothing usually involving more folksy blather, another shite metaphor, and more extraneous dialogue. Repeat IN EVERY SINGLE PARAGRAPH ON EVERY SINGLE FUCKING PAGE UNTIL YOU WANT TO BLOW YOUR BRAINS OUT.

It’s like reading latter-day Stephen King minus the sometimes compelling characters and stories and just enduring his irritating homespun, conversational nattering which has become such a big insufferable feature of his work now that I’ve had to give up his books. McDaniel’s style is endless waffle waffle waffle, drivel drivel drivel punctuated by a cast of stereotypical hillbillies gosh darnin’ their way through one tedious sentence after another. I lost count of the number of times I muttered to myself GET. THE FUCK. ON WITH IT.

Would you like an aneurysm? Read this book. The Worst Novel of 2016.