Tiffany McDaniel (2016) The Summer That Melted Everything.

I loved Tiffany McDaniel’s recent novel Betty. The Summer That Melted Everything was her debut novel. Poets make the best novelists, her words sing. She uses John Milton’s Paradise Lost as a framing device for each chapter. The first paragraph forewarns what has to come. Beautifully done.

‘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 have been expected, though…

‘It was a heat that didn’t just melt tangible things like ice, chocolate. Popsicles. It melted all the intangibles too. Fear, faith, anger, and those long-trusted templates of common sense. It melted lives as well, leaving futures to be slung with the dirt of the gravedigger’s shovel.

I was thirteen when it all happened.’

The narrator is seventy-one when it all ends, but it never ends. Fielding Bliss always goes back to that summer in Breathed, Ohio. His dad, Autopsy Bliss, is the town’s lawyer. The kind of man that always does the right thing. Think Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. Tiffany McDaniel gives a sly nod in that direction. The local beauty, Dresden, the devil falls in love with, is reading Harper Lee’s classic and circling words. Autopsy Bliss always does the right thing. So it’s a surprise with unforeseen consequences when he does the wrong thing (essentially we can talk about plot here) and writes a letter in the local paper inviting the devil to come visit the ‘Land of hills and hay bales, of sinners and forgivers’.

Nobody expects the devil to turn up. The devil has many names. He takes the guise of a thirteen-year-old boy. The Bliss family come to christen him Sal, and treat him as just another son. Fielding already has a brother. He’s eighteen and perfect in every way. Grand makes the school’s baseball team the best it’s ever been. The prettiest girls are just waiting to be plucked from that tree by Grand. He’s got a secret that’s not really a secret. You’ll guess it pretty early, but in the heat and the hate, everything melds. It’s no secret that Sal is black. Even the devil can’t hide the colour of his skin.

Pick away at that confectionary niceness of those genteel Southern towns. A black boy coming-of-age is a threat, when he claims to be the devil he’s given license. The heat of the devil and a forked road for the townsfolk. Two and two can make five in George Orwell’s 1984. And in Milgram’s experiment good American men and women tortured their American counterparts because they had to. They were told to. Tiffany McDaniel’s prescient debut novel was written before the QAnon conspiracy theory took hold of large parts of the American nation (Hillary Clinton and her cronies murdered and cannibalised children while worshipping Satan was a common belief among the moron’s moron’s followers—and still has some purchase). Sometimes clichés are true. They walk and talk. Fact is stranger than fiction. Leo Tolstoy suggested ‘We imagine their sufferings are one thing and our life is another.’ Tiffany McDaniel imagines both. I’ll be reading more of her work. Read on.