What Lurks in the Woods

Darby Bozeman’s debut thriller, Summer’s Never Over, turns a lakeside children’s camp in a remote Georgia forest into a backdrop for jump-scares. A black-clad figure campers call the Phantom stalks the grounds at night, windows are smashed, campers go missing. Then the forest goes up in flames, and a popular counselor named Stephanie dies.

In the prologue, the narrator, Greer Olsen, says this about herself as she flees the fire that’s consuming the scene around her: “Everything is her fault, of course. She has been stupid. Reckless. If only she’d told someone what she’d found….” The secrets Greer kept, like the secrets of some other seemingly trustworthy characters, are unspooled as the story switches back and forth in time from the summer of the fire (“Then”) to five years later (“Now”), with the camp set to celebrate its reopening.

That’s when Greer gets the news that her 51-year-old mother, the owner of the camp — aptly named Dread’s Cove — has died of cardiac arrest. The welcome-back weekend now will also serve as a memorial service for its leader, a figure alternately admired over her long career and, since the fire, vilified for possible dishonesty. Greer, who is to inherit the legendary camp where she grew up, hasn’t been on the site in the five-year interval because of traumatizing thoughts of Stephanie, a friend Greer adored, “burning alive.”

In the days leading up to the fire, while the Phantom lurked at night, vandalizing buildings and terrorizing young campers, a psychological drama played out in the cabin where four counselors — Greer and Stephanie, plus Chelsea and Margo — lived.

Greer, now a reluctant heiress, has been working as a bartender in Atlanta, trying to recover from the tragedy and the departure of her boyfriend. Her lifelong best friend Chelsea, who grew up beside her in Dread’s Cove, is shy and fastidious, given to identifying bird calls mid-conversation and critical of Greer’s lack of loyalty to the camp.

Stephanie and Margo were last-minute hires the summer of the fire, sorority sisters just graduated from the University of Georgia. The magnetic Stephanie instantly charmed campers, as well as Greer, who chooses to ignore a disturbing discovery about her friend. Margo, the fourth member of the quartet, was also devoted to Stephanie and was Greer’s sharpest critic. She returns for the camp’s reopening as a reporter for an Atlanta newspaper, on a mission to uncover the details of her friend’s death.

When they meet again, Greer and Margo gird themselves one night to revisit the cabin they once shared with Stephanie. As they go, Greer shushes Margo, who says, “Oh, boo, you’re no fun at all. Glad to know some things never change.” “Really?” Greer says. “That was your biggest problem with me, back then? That I wasn’t fun—” Then twigs snap behind them, the sign of a stalker. This phenomenon happens more than once in Summer’s Never Over. The plot is seeded with moments when the narrator finds her “heart thumping in my ribcage,” or says that a “spike of unease shot up my spine,” or the “back of my neck prickled,” as it does when Greer and Margo discover evidence that Stephanie and her parents had been at the camp in the past, about the time Stephanie’s mother disappeared.

Greer’s romantic adventures figure into the mysteries. At the outset, she unceremoniously drops her longtime relationship with a camp cook, then she’s drawn to a lifeguard named Trevor. Bozeman, a Knoxville resident who has a graduate degree in teaching from the University of Georgia and taught middle school English, has a gift for fleshing out her young characters in convincing ways and supplying them with believable dialogue, though Greer’s flirtation with Trevor finds her indulging in some cliches: “Every time I looked at him the butterflies started to swarm.”

In classic murder-mystery form, trusted characters are compromised, suspicious characters are misunderstood. Occasionally, the narrative has the reassuring atmosphere of well-constructed YA fiction, but it’s an adult novel that earns the violent, cinematic solution to the mysteries it creates.