The novel “The Last Day of Summer” by Andrey Podshibyakin. Review

A new novel by Andrey Podshibyakin, The Last Day of Summer, has been released in Elena Shubina’s Editing. The author of one book about LiveJournal, where he was the managing editor, and two books about gaming journalism in the second half of the 1990s and early 2000s, in which he was one of the prominent figures, in his fourth book turned to older times and included elements of horror in it. More precisely, he wrote a horror film, in which he included elements of memories. What turned out to be scarier in “The Last Day of Summer” – mysticism or reality, I tried to understand Mikhail Prokov.

In the era described in the previous book, Igrozhure, Andrey Podshibyakin, under the pseudonym Andrey Om, collaborated with Game.EXE magazine, dear to the heart of every non-millennial gamer. And for this alone he deserved the closest and most benevolent attention to his literary experiments. Now Podshibyakin has written a novel not about journalists, but about Rostov teenagers in the first half of the 1990s, who strive to be inhabited by something ancient and infinitely powerful.

1993 In Moscow, in the words of one of the heroes, Grown-up Shit takes place, and Rostov-on-Don lives its usual life: adults drink and swear, mafiosi wet competitors, swear and drink, policemen swear, drink and fire at mafiosi or take plump ones from them envelopes. Teenage scumbags go wild, swear, drink and dream of becoming a mafia – or at least just bandits. Ordinary teenagers go to school, swear, are afraid of scumbags and dream about the same thing. Meanwhile, in the bowels of the ancient Tanais – now with. Nedvigovka of the Rostov region – an ancient evil awakens.

In general, The Last Day of Summer is not a work for teenagers, but rather for those adults who remember how they were teenagers and are sure that their adolescence was different from that described by the classics of Russian teenage literature – be it Anatoly Aleksin, Vladislav Krapivin , Radiy Pogodin or Anatoly Rybakov. And Andrey Podshibyakin’s novel is not exactly a classic novel: in the afterword, the author mentions at least two failed serial projects, and there are so many cliffhangers hanging around the text of the book, as if it were not about a dozen or two hour-long episodes, but about a couple of hundred ten-minute ones.

Criticism found in the characters of “The Last Day of Summer” some similarities with the characters of the series “Very Strange Things” – adjusted for the climatic and moral differences between Rostov in the 1990s and Indiana in the 1980s. As for the teenage protagonists, they are really cute and unlike one another. Adolescent antagonists cause disgust and fear. Teachers are moderately stupid and bitchy, parents are stupid, unhappy and rude. The conflict between Boris Yeltsin and the Supreme Soviet is developing on TV – parents are worried, but teenagers are not up to it. At the same time, at first they are not so much busy with something. True, one of the heroes, Arkasha, plays the piano at the insistence of his parents, the other, Styopa, left without parents, takes care of a bedridden grandmother and a cat; here, in fact, that’s all. Homework, as you might guess, does not take much time from eighth graders. The emptiness of their lives is filled only by a showdown with the punks – and when an adult criminal joins the punks, out of a not very clear whim, the occupancy increases significantly.

The first round of the conflict between good and bad ends with a miraculous rescue: Arkashin’s friend Vitya, nicknamed Kruger, joins Arkasha and Styopa, and at the most stressful moment, their new classmate, Sasha, nicknamed Shaman, appears, behind whose back is a powerful brother, the closest henchman of the main local “foreman “. The attack is repulsed, but, naturally, the black forces are not asleep. In the meantime, the ancient evil also comes out of hibernation – for this, however, all four boys have to cut open their arms or legs on the same day and rather calmly contemplate their own blood, which does not want to stop either after ten minutes or after four hours. Blood soaks into the ground, evil, yawning, goes hunting. Which side will it take? How does it fit into an already dense plot? Is there a first love or a heroic death waiting for some of the teenagers? Will one of the adults play the role of a virtuous sheriff, or will the children manage on their own? Or will the ancient evil have to take the rap for everyone at once?

Those who have not read the novel will most likely find the answers to all these questions in the film – the film rights were bought even before the book went on sale. But both those and others cannot but be warned: something is something, and the logic of characters in the answers should not be expected. If in the first chapters it is Vitya Kruger who surprises with mood swings and unpredictable reactions – he is apparently assigned the role of Dustin from Stranger Things in this company – then soon everyone begins to behave this way, regardless of age and proximity to the center of the local chthoni . One gets the feeling that, having described fear and rage – the most frequent emotions experienced by the characters of “The Last Day …”, Andrey Podshibyakin left all other feelings to generate neural networks. We have to remember that when he was a game journalist, he specialized mainly in shooters – role-playing games were reviewed by other authors.

At the same time, there is something so attractive in the teenage worldview that, despite the lack of logic in the characters and irritation from all sorts of stiltedness, Podshibyakin’s Rostov retrohorror is quite easy to read to the end. As fans of computer games would say: “The toy is raw, the dialogues are written on the knee, but the gameplay is not bad, and almost does not freeze, you can go through it once. Just don’t take it without a discount!