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It must transgress outworn conventions in its snarling, iconoclastic, Satanic way. It needs to summon the resources of the exotic and the extreme. A demoniac art sets out to smash our suburban complacency and release our repressed energies. In this way, perhaps, some good might finally be salvaged from evil” (2010, 69). He continues by claiming “in a homeopathic kind of gesture, we should embrace the demonic in order to defeat it” (ibid). Marx, in contextualizing the voice of socialism in the wake of reductive religious fervor, puts it this way: “The immediate task of philosophy which is in the service of history is to unmask human self-alienation in its unholy forms now that it has been unmasked in its holy forms” (1994c, 28).

The locals live up to their “primitivism” as they resort to what is at best juvenile delinquency and at worst murder, and the bourgeois couple are unlikely to see another summer, at least through the windows of their second home. That the text exhibits no partiality toward any of its characters, and indeed, depicts, on the surface, little more than highly compromised ethics on both sides of the class divide, leaves the burden of proof to the reader—that is, proof of “The Summer People” offering more than conventional horror or facile cynicism or nihilism.

Charlie Walpole chimes in with, “Never been summer people before, at the lake after Labor Day” (110). A Mr. Hall explains, “Labor Day is when they usually leave . . surprised you’re staying on” (111). ), he repeats. The delivery invariably feels flat but charged with apprehension. Unlike Bartleby’s colleagues, however, the Allisons do not internalize what is in fact an admonition. They persist in adhering to their plan with single-minded determination. If there is a parallel with anyone in Melville’s story, it is certainly with Bartleby’s employer who can only ineffectively rationalize the lingering presence of his antagonist.