Picturing Anchor’s Mercy, a Gay Resort Town | The Dead of Summer by Ryan La Sala

The Dead of Summer by Ryan La Sala builds one of the most vivid fictional settings we've read all year, and Joseph and Ben spend this whole clip picturing it in detail. This clip is from our full spoiler book club breakdown of The Dead of Summer, and it's a full world-building deep dive into Anger's Mercy, the small gay resort town where the entire book takes place. Joseph and Ben talk through the inn Ollie's family owns, debating whether its big open room, piano, and mezzanine reads more like a bed and breakfast or an Old West saloon, and compare the wider town to real-world queer resort destinations like Provincetown and Fire Island. They also get into the book's core cast of adults, including Willie and the drag queen Wendy Pretendi, and talk about how deliberately the book is engaging with the current cultural moment around drag story hours and queer visibility, turning Anger's Mercy into a kind of aspirational gay utopia before the horror plot kicks in. It's one of the richer, more thoughtful world-building conversations from the full episode, and a good example of how much craft is going on underneath the horror-comedy surface of this book. Setting is doing a lot of work in this book, and Anger's Mercy ends up functioning almost like its own character. The choice to build such a specific, lovingly detailed gay utopia before tearing it apart with a zombie outbreak says a lot about what Ryan La Sala is interested in exploring, and it's part of why this world-building conversation ended up running so long in the full episode. They also speculate about how a future film adaptation might handle the book's found-document structure and late reveal, given that Ryan La Sala's other major book is already being adapted, which adds a fun bit of industry speculation on top of the world-building conversation. Gay Panic! Book Club is a queer literature podcast hosted by childhood best friends Joseph Price and Ben Lilly, where every month we do a full spoiler discussion of a queer book, whether that's queer horror, queer YA, queer literary fiction, or anything else that crosses our radar. We're not a star-rating review show. We're two lifelong readers who happen to be gay, talking through the books that made us feel seen. This month's pick, The Dead of Summer, follows Ollie, a teenager reuniting with his newly cancer-free mother on Anger's Mercy, a small, aggressively gay tourist island, right as a coral infection turns the whole town into a zombie outbreak. Along the way we meet Sam, a wealthy and mysterious new arrival, and Bash and Elisa, Ollie's childhood best friends turned pizza shop coworkers turned reluctant survival team. Fans of Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas, Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, and Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller will find a lot to love here — queer found family, body horror, grief, and a whole lot of camp, wrapped around a genuinely well-constructed horror plot. Watch the full episode, where we go through the entire book from the ferry ride to the finale twist:    • The Dead of Summer by Ryan La Sala | Coral...   📖 GET THE BOOK Every purchase through our affiliate link supports the Malibu Village Bookstore GoFundMe 🔥, helping rebuild a beloved independent bookstore devastated by the Palisades Fire. 👉 The Dead of Summer: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-dead... 👉 Full Gay Panic! reading list: https://bookshop.org/lists/gay-panic-... 📲 FIND US 📸 Instagram: @book_clubbin_podcasts 🎵 TikTok: @book_clubbin_podcasts 👍 Facebook: Book Clubbin' Podcasts 🗓️ NEXT EPISODE Next month, we're trading zombie coral for gay James Bond with The Tuxedo Society by Paul Rudnick, a queer mystery-comedy about a man recruited into a secret society of gay spies. Keywords: The Dead of Summer, Ryan La Sala, queer YA horror, queer book club, gay book club, LGBTQ books, queer literature, world building, gay resort town, Provincetown, Fire Island, drag queen fiction, YA horror, queer YA, gay YA books, book review, book discussion, reading podcast, Gay Panic Book Club, Book Clubbin Podcasts