How To Survive A Summer: A Novel

A debut novel centering around a gay conversion camp in Mississippi, and a man’s reckoning with the trauma he faced there as a teen.

Camp Levi-nestled in the Mississippi countryside-is designed to cure young teenage boys of their budding homosexuality. Will Dillard, a Midwestern graduate student, spent a summer at the camp as a teenager, and has since tried to erase that experience from his mind. But when a fellow student alerts him that a slasher movie based on the camp is being released, he is forced to confront his troubled history and possible culpability in the death of a fellow camper.

As past and present are woven together, Will recounts his rehabilitation, eventually returning to the abandoned campgrounds to solve the mysteries of that pivotal summer, and to reclaim his story from those who have stolen it. With a masterful confluence of sensibility and place, How to Survive a Summer introduces an exciting new literary voice.