Suds Stick Together - The Dead of Summer

The following contains spoilers for The Dead of Summer

Jonathan Nolan did an interview about The Dark Knight and discussed a thematic inspiration for the film. For him, the keystone to understanding the dynamics of the movie is the scene when Batman, Gordon, and Dent stand on the GCPD roof and talk about how they’re going to extradite Lau back to the U.S. The three might have different ideas on how to save Gotham, but they’re working together to put the city on a course to prosperity and such.

By the end of the movie Dent lies dead in the wake of a killing spree he perpetrated. Batman takes Harvey’s sins upon himself and disappears into the ether. Gordon manages to walk away, but has lost the two people he most trusted to save the city alongside him, leaving him alone as the one guy who can maintain order in Gotham.

For Nolan, this is the arc of a triumvirate: if they start strong as three pillars, then the story should be about how that trio fails to survive in the wake of their challenge. The inspiration is Ancient Rome, where Julius Caesar, Marc Antony, and Marcus Licinius Crassus formed a ruling trio who could hold the Republic together. Even without a big history lesson, based on Julius Caesar being involved, you can probably guess how that went.

In his new book The Dead of Summer, Ryan La Sala follows a boy named Ollie, a 17 year-old boy who returns home to an island off the coast of Maine. Ollie is a ball of remorse and loneliness and anxiety, having survived his mother’s year-long fight against leukemia and still suffering from the lingering trauma of her survival. To complicate matters, he’s estranged himself from his two best friends Bash and Elisa, having ghosted them when he returned with his mother to the mainland for her cancer treatments. He didn’t handle it well.

Despite Ollie being the main character and a good amount of focus on his complicated relationship with his mother, La Sala spends a lot of time establishing this group of friends (who go by the nickname the Suds) and all of the various facets of their relationship. Given that the Suds comprise three characters (Ollie, Bash, & Elisa), it’s impressive that La Sala manages to play into this idea of the triumvirate collapsing but also the idea of the triumvirate evolving, growing, strengthening, and (ultimately) becoming more.

It rocks.

Picking up the broken pieces

Part of the reason the Suds have to reform quickly is because of the Weeper attack that strikes the island of Anchor’s Mercy. The peril necessitates cohesion.

Before the attack, though, Ollie begins to reconcile with Bash and Elisa. He’s so worried that they’re mad at him, that they’ll fight with him, or tell him to fuck off forever. But that’s not what friends do. All of Ollie’s insecurities about their friendship comes from his own working through his being his mother’s primary caretaker. He might have abandoned them to work through his own shit, but they never abandoned him. The love they all feel far surpasses Ollie’s year-long lapse of communication.

It’s not perfect. Elisa’s mother’s disappearance still haunts her (and this storyline runs the course of the book) and the prospect of losing Ollie’s mom has threatened to put her through all that again. She doesn’t really forgive Ollie for locking her out of the shared grief. Bash himself derives threats from Ollie’s relationship with new island visitor Sam. These issues prove challenges for all three to work through, and in working through those things it means that by the end of the book the three are stronger than ever as they work to fight a bigger and more dangerous enemy. One they can only defeat by working together.

And, true enough, in one of the Querrent-2 interviews, “Ollie” talks about the intimacy the three of them shared, how he and Bash had been physically intimate numerous times and how the three of them “were in love with being a trio”. Their interests in keeping that going extends beyond mere friendship. It is something more.

Dividing and conquering

By the end of the book, the Suds have uncovered a conspiracy that threatens the entire island and also the world. It’s got a few cliffhangers, which La Sala will resolve in a future sequel. Sam feels like a character with more meat left on the bone, and the entire conspiracy feels like it’s only beginning to unravel. There’s more to tell.

But the major cliffhanger is the division which the Suds have undergone by virtue of the plot itself. The Weeper infection takes Ollie the last we see of him is him joining the collective. Bash is impersonating Ollie but stuck under lock and key on the Embrace. Elisa is also somewhere on the Embrace, drumming up support for whatever comes next. They have a plan, but we don’t really know what it is.

Despite the book strengthening the Suds, it stays in line with the idea that they must break apart for the story to be successful. It should feel like a bleak, dour ending, but the three of them are stronger than ever with physical distance as the primary threat. They’re using their various plots and schemes to separately-collectgively undermine the government threat and the Weepers. Other than that, they’re as strong as ever.

Community

And yet, for all this strength the Suds are not some exclusive threesome. Sam (whom Ollie meets on the boat) should feel like some interloper, but the Suds are quick to invite him to their ranks just like Bash ends up invites Querrent-2 to join their cause as the book wraps. Broadening the scope and horizon of what a Sud can be expands in the same way the Queer community (at its best) broadens its horizons to include anyone who wishes to find strength in a community of shared experience and common interest than blood circumstance.

For all that the Weepers are a major threat to all of humanity, the real villain of the book is a government that holds itself hostage on account of the secrets at Anchor’s Mercy. Much like his previous book The Honeys, Ryan La Sala recognizes malignancy at the heart of pre-established organizations, especially those that have smothered themselves in history and tradition.

The Weepers are a new lifeform. They are an amalgamation of coral that knows nothing but spreading and forming a larger community. It’s explicitly cancerous, but it’s hard to get mad at cancer for being cancer. We can just detest it for its rampant, boundless spread and the destruction it leaves in its wake.

A government, though, should hold itself to a higher standard. This has come up several times on this substack, but governments are only as malicious as we allow them to be. For La Sala, trying to make a better world is just as important as cleaning up the latent mess of the energy projects of the 1970s that created the Slow Water in the first place. That’s only possible from exposing what the government has done and carving its own cancer out. The government isn’t meant to be cancerous, but letting these ills metastasize and wreck havoc only gets worse the more people ignore those problems.

Through communities we can build better societies. In the middle of the book, the Suds find themselves in the library, caught between Wendy Pretendy and Dr. Pfaff. Wendy is trying to survive long enough to escape this hell and return to normal. Pfaff has her own scientific interests, her own fascinations she wishes to investigate. Neither of these is solving the direct problem of what happened in the past and how to make the island habitable again. If Wendy gets her way, there’s nothing to stopping this from happening again. If Pfaff gets her way, well… the island’s inhabitants will be experiments to help researchers learn about the Slow Water and just how protected the natives are from the infection.

Working together is the only solution. Suds sticking together isn’t just a mantra for Ollie, Bash, and Elisa to live by, it’s a prerogative that can encourage them to work together to make an even better existence. Understanding that is a tenet of the LGBTQ movement and a pillar of that community. Exclusivity can be toxic and dangerous while inclusivity can anticipate problems before they grow too big, and a diversity of viewpoints can shore up blindspots and weaknesses. Even a trio can only be so strong.