During this time of year when the leaves start to turn and the wind gets a chill, it makes you want to curl up in bed and read a good book. Halloween is this weekend, and readers are always looking for horror tales to thrill and chill them.
Dark Harvest by Norman Partidge is one of those overlooked horror titles that deserves to be read long into the night, under the covers, with a mug of hot tea. Winner of the 2006 Bram Stoker award for Best Horror Novel, the book takes place in a nameless small Midwestern town in 1963 where nothing much happens and no one goes anyplace, and things are the way they always have been. Except for Halloween Night, where once every year after a dark ritual, a creature with the head of a pumpkin rises in a cornfield and tries to make its way to the church in the center of the town. In the creature's way is the entire teen population armed with makeshift weapons, because the teenager who brings down the creature is rewarded by the town elders with a ticket out of town, and the teen's family is given riches. Of course, things are not always what they seem, and this year one of the teens who hunts for the creature has larger plans and discovers the dark secret behind the ritual and the origins of the town.
Partridge is an excellent writer with a distinct voice, and Dark Harvest reads like a combination of Shirley Jackson's short story "The Lottery" with early Stephen King. He wonderfully brings to life the fears and anxieties of a community in the time right before the JFK assassination, and the angish of young adults in small towns who have nothing better to look forward to than what they already have. Also, the novel is a short one, so the admittedly strange premise of the book isn't stretched too thin. Partridge delivers the chills without stooping to descriptions of gore - this is no CSI serial killer, but a supernatural creature who might turn out to be just as helpless a victim as the desperate teenagers who hunt it.
This is a tale well-told: a good yarn, in the old-fashioned sense of the term, and deserves to be better known. Give this book a try, if you dare.