Since it came out last fall, Lee Mandelo’s Summer Sons has been hailed as an adherent of the “dark academia” aesthetic. And with good reason: the novel is set in the land surrounding a prestigious southern university, overflowing with menacing history, occult knowledge, and the attractive trappings of prestige. It follows Andrew, an outsider to the academy, as he investigates his best friend’s mysterious death, falling in with crowds both intellectual and rowdy, and struggling with literal and figurative ghosts in the process. It’s also, as with so many iterations of dark academia, undeniably queer. Horny, closeted, and haunted, Andrew is basically the king of dark academia protagonists (or the jester, depending on how you look at it).
But Summer Sons is also doing something unique with these generic elements, asking new questions and revealing fissures and cracks along their seams. The academy housing Andrew’s mystery isn’t an ivory tower covered in creeping ivy and fanboys of classic literature. Instead it is something at once more specific to its setting and truer to academia as it actually exists: a plantation house on stolen land, milling with an uneven mix of well-meaning white, middle class voyeurs and marginalized people, navigating disconnection (and often newfound) privilege. And Andrew isn’t just queer: he wants, specifically, to have sex with men.
