Review: If John Carpenter directed Stand By Me....
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 02 22, 2013
The summer is coming to an end.  Aiden, Brian, and Freddie, three fifth graders and best friends, are determined to make the most of it.  On the final weekend before the start of school, the group of kids end up staying the weekend at Aiden's father's home; a massive house on a large wooded lot that just happens to have the coolest tree house three twelve year olds could possibly hope for.  Built on a massive tree, the tree house is thirty feet in the air complete with working windows and a rope ladder!  A child of divorce, Aiden isn't overly happy about spending the weekend with his father and his new, young girlfriend, but with the company of his rag tag group of buddies and access to the mother of all tree houses, it may just be the best weekend of the summer...until they start hearing the sounds.  At first they pass it off as a bird...until they see IT.  IT is determined to get them and they have no place to go, trapped three stories in the air, left to their own devices with no way to get down and seek shelter in Aiden's father's house.  What will happen to the trio when they meet something straight out of nightmare and their friendship is taken to to limit?Imagine if John Carpenter (director of The Thing re-make--a personal favorite of mine) had gotten his hands on Stand By Me.  What would you get?  You'd get A Hollow Dream of Summer's End.  Stand By Me featured a group of friends, all from very different backgrounds, going on an adventure of sorts.  The sense of innocence lost, relationships tested in a pressure cooker of stressful moments.  Much like that, the three kids in Summer's End are different in their own ways.  Aiden, athletic, quiet, uncomfortable as a child of divorce, torn between the past family he knew and making room for his father and his much younger girlfriend.  Brian, fat, honest to a fault, stutterer.  Freddie, short tempered, wisecracking extraordinaire who's really just putting on a tough face because he comes from a poor family.  Then you have The Thing.  A group of co-workers forced to face an insurmountable terrorizing horror in a frozen wasteland, cut off from help or civilization of any kind.  It's claustrophobic, close quartered and tense.  Trust no one.Andrew Van Wey mashes those two genres together and produces a brutal and engaging read.  Three friends pitted against a horrific monster, cut off from the only people around for miles who could possibly be of any help for them?  It makes for a visceral and engaging read.  This is no children's story.  It's told through Aiden's perspective, but the author puts them through things most adults can't handle.  The fact that it focuses on fifth graders makes it all the more brutal. It's very near uncomfortable at times.  Bad things happening to relatively innocent kids is never easy to swallow, but that ups the horror factor splendidly.  This book could very well give you the chills.Summer's End is very well written, as you may expect being that it comes from the same mind that produced the wonderful Forsaken.  The kids read like kids.  They're into video games, they bust each other's chops, they're into 'the female anatomy' without even knowing much about it.  Van Wey puts us into the shoes of very diverse and very real and identifiable children and puts them through hell, through the meat grinder.  And there are a couple twists in this one.  Very nice twists.  Very chilling twists.This novella is worth the time of any horror/dark fiction fan.  Van Wey is an untapped resource in the world of macabre fiction and anybody looking for a good, twisted read, should have their sights trained right on him.Fantastic.