Books book reviews The Dead of Summer by Ryan La Sala is an Ambitious Eco-Horror Alex Brown reviews a “taut, tense YA eco-horror novel.” By Alex Brown | Published on November 17, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share Anchor’s Mercy is a small island of a couple hundred residents just off the coast of Maine. Visitors descend on its shores all summer, but off season is so quiet that locals know if the tourists stop coming, the island will die. Ollie and his mother Gracie arrive at Anchor’s Mercy along with a ferry full of partygoers, prodigal residents returned. After Gracie’s months-long battle with cancer on the mainland, the two are finally able to return to the safety of their community. His mother is determined that everything goes back to normal, so much so she’s overflowing with toxic positivity. Ollie already tried to pretend everything was normal, to the point where he couldn’t bring himself to talk to his friends while he was gone. He knows nothing will ever be the same as it was. On the ferry, Ollie meets a mysterious boy, Sam, who claims to have a wealthy aunt with a vacation house on the island. Sam is pulled into Gracie’s orbit, and Ollie can’t help but be drawn to Sam in turn.  Once on the island, Ollie, with Sam in tow, tentatively reestablishes contact with his (ex?) friends Bash and Elisa. Before they can sort out their feelings, people start falling ill. They smile uncontrollably and sing without realizing it, and all the liquid in their body thickens into slime. Coral sprouts from their bodies, and the infected fuse together into terrifying mutant monsters. Trapped on an dying island, Ollie, Bash, Elisa, and Sam must survive at all costs. But what can they do when the very people who rescue them are the ones who caused this all in the first place? The plot of The Dead of Summer doesn’t happen chronologically but loops back and forth in time, changes narrators, and plays with format. About a third of the narrative appears as interview transcripts, diary entries, and other documentation gathered after the plague takes over the island. It’s a clever way to tell this story, and one that turns a plot full of well-worn tropes into something fresh. Without those additions, the story would have been much less exciting. The coral eco-horror parts are exciting, but we’ve seen this plot a zillion times before. La Sala of course puts his own spin on it, but this territory has been explored to death (pun intended). Through the extra narrative elements, he’s able to shape these old tropes into something new and bold. Buy the Book The Dead of Summer Ryan La Sala Buy Book The Dead of Summer Ryan La Sala Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget One of my ongoing complaints in speculative YA is that many books feel like they’re either one book stretched out into two books even though the narrative can’t support it or two books that have been poorly stitched together into one. The Dead of Summer is well-paced and just the right length (even though it tops out at 400 pages). The reason it works as the first book in a series? The extra narrative elements. There is a lot of smart literary craft coming from La Sala on the backend. I don’t know that this is La Sala’s strongest novel—that’s probably The Honeys or Reverie—but it is his most creatively ambitious one. This is a taut, tense eco-horror that builds from a quiet start to a roaring crescendo. It opens two days before all hell breaks loose with Ollie and Gracie’s less-than-triumphant return to Anchor’s Mercy, then jumps to a redacted journal entry from an unknown doctoral student, Querent 1, 23 days into hell. I was desperate to find out what happened not just to Ollie but also his friends and family.  Some characters we get to know pretty well while others, mostly the adults, come and go. La Sala imbues even the ones we don’t spend as much time with with layered personalities. Everyone feels like they have lives off the page and outside our protagonists, no matter how little we know about them. The antagonist is deliciously complex and morally gray, as per usual with this author. He doesn’t do the typical Big Bad, the kind that is evil for the sake of being evil; instead he develops characters who do bad things for what they think are good reasons, even if everyone else disagrees. They make choices that hurt others but find ways to justify that hurt in real (if not entirely honest) ways.  Ultimately, this is a story about community and found family. In his acknowledgements, La Sala describes how the real world “beachy queer haven” of Provincetown, Massachusetts was the inspiration for Anchor’s Mercy. I’ve never been to that part of Cape Cod, but La Sala definitely got the haven part down. Anchor’s Mercy is full of townies who work together and love each other even through the other’s worst. Bad behavior isn’t excused, but people are given the grace to mess up as long as they try to make up for it, as we see with Ollie and Gracie. But that desire for community can also drive some to choose blissful ignorance. It can make it hard to address systemic problems, and those who don’t stop pushing are often pushed out of the safety net, as we see with Elisa’s mother. The real tension in this novel comes not just from the mutant coral monsters terrorizing the town but the community itself. It’s arguable whether or not the community could’ve prevented this tragedy, but by refusing to even consider the possibility, the tragedy became so much worse. The best thing I can say about Ryan La Sala’s The Dead of Summer is that I can’t wait to find out what happens in book two. The second best thing I can say is that I hope this book kicks off an eco-horror trend in YA fiction. With everything going on in the world right now, eco-horror is the ideal playground for YA horror.[end-mark] The Dead of Summer is published by PUSH. The post <i>The Dead of Summer</i> by Ryan La Sala is an Ambitious Eco-Horror appeared first on Reactor.