Bookworks Presents Shelf Awareness for Readers: Worst. Summer. Ever.

As a kid, I never went to summer camp. The farthest I ever got from home was family camping trips to the Oregon coast, and if it wasn't the mosquitoes, it was the rain that bummed us out. But had I known then just how terrible a summer vacation could be, I probably wouldn't have whined so much.

Edmund White's 1973 novel, Forgetting Elena, depicts a young man's summer on Fire Island. He carefully studies the movements of those around him, cautious not to offend yet craving popularity. White's island inhabitants pander to the wealthy, while delivering dramatic--even violent--rebukes to the pretentious. Their perceived slights, advantages taken, attention seeking and one magnificent house fire could give Tina Fey's mean girls a run for their money, while ruining a summer far more thoroughly than a few insect bites could.

This gaggle of socialites, however, might find themselves outmatched by Shirley Jackson's Hill House. Dr. Montague invites Eleanor Vance and two others to summer at the gothic monstrosity, but they might have fared better by just setting the whole thing ablaze right away. The Haunting of Hill Housetoys with its characters as much as it does its readers, mounting one psychological game on top of another, until somebody cracks up. Frightening noises in the night, the morose and unpleasant housekeeping staff, a sinister history of betrayal and the unsettling effect it has on its guests make Hill House far more foreboding than the tedious bickering of cliques and a little rain on a West Coast campground combined.

All things considered, I have much to be grateful for from the summers of my childhood; I could have had White or Jackson plan my family vacations. But as terrible as the summers they've written might be for their characters, they make for fine reading. --Dave Wheeler, associate editor, Shelf Awareness