The Summer That Melted Everything

The summer of 1984 in Breathed, Ohio, begins when Autopsy Bliss, the town prosecutor, prints an invitation in the local paper welcoming the devil to visit. What arrives is a barefoot Black boy in overalls named Sal, who speaks of Heaven and Hell with unsettling knowledge and calmly claims to be the devil himself. Autopsy's thirteen-year-old son, Fielding, takes Sal in—and through the older Fielding's grieving hindsight, we watch one scorching, unbearable summer unfold.

As a relentless heat wave settles over Breathed, so does something darker: suspicion, cruelty, and violence that need no supernatural source. Tiffany McDaniel's The Summer That Melted Everything is a lush, devastating Southern-gothic debut—part magical realism, part coming-of-age tragedy—about racism, fear of the other, lost innocence, and the ordinary human capacity for evil.