Summary: Dark Harvest

Dark Harvest
by Norman Partridge

“He’s the October Boy . . . the reaper that grows in the field, the merciless trick with a heart made of treats, the butchering nightmare with the hacksaw face . . . and he’s gonna getcha! That’s what they always told you . . . he’s gonna getcha so you know you’ve been got!!!!!”

GENRE:

Horror Fiction, suspense fiction.

Place:

A “nameless” Midwestern town

Time:

October 31, 1963

DESCRIPTORS:

Horror, Rite of Passage, Family, Relationships, Teenagers, Small Towns, Supernatural Creature, Pumpkins, Quest Story, “Running the Gauntlet”, Escape.

SUMMARY:

For five days before Halloween, every teenage boy has been locked up in his bedroom with no food, only water to keep them going. Then on Halloween night, they are all released with a weapon — a club, a machete, a board with nails. They are sent to hunt down a scarecrow nightmare with a glowing pumpkin-headed, hacksaw face and a body of vines entangling bags worth of candy.

Every boy must hunt the monstrous October Boy down and kill it to win the coveted ticket out of this dead-end town. The October Boy must run the gauntlet to the church in the middle of town and ring the bell before midnight.

Pete McCormick knows that his only chance to escape the town that ruined his father is to be the one to bring down the October Boy. He wins and he gets to leave, his father and sister get a new house and car and maybe a new lease on life. If he loses, he remains stuck in the town for the rest of his life. Of course, that assumes he survives the night because between him and freedom stands marauding packs of armed and starving teenage boys, a belligerent cop with a grudge and the town’s nightmare come back to life . . . The October Boy.

APPEAL:

The trade paperback edition’s cover made my all-time favorite book cover list and the plot is definitely compelling. But the writing . . .

Let me explain. Norman Partridge is a suburb wordsmith. His use of language put me in the mind of rural small town America as completely as Jack Finney’s The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. BUT . . . yes, there is a but, Dark Harvest is written in second person present tense. It is a narrator, who knows the story, talking to you, who also knows the story, or at least some of it. The thing is, the “you” that the narrator is talking to shifts periodically. Most of the time you are a town member, or maybe a former town member. Sometimes you are one of the characters in the story — Pete McCormick, Officer Jerry Ricks, Dan Shepard, even the October Boy itself. The reader becomes the character within the story for a time.

Reading Dark Harvest is very jarring at first and challenging throughout. Try this opening:

A Midwestern town. You know its name. You were born there.

Or this line:

But you already know about him. After all, you grew up here. There aren’t any secrets left for you. You know the story as well as I do.

Pete McCormick knows the story, too . . . part of it anyway. Pete just turned sixteen. He’s been in town his whole life, but he’s never managed to fit in.

However, and this is the catch, if you hang with it and work through the book, it works. It’s a campfire tale or a conversation, a recollection or oral storytelling written down. It’s immediate and different in a way that adds to the sense of the small town flavor.

People who have read Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery” are going to think they’ve caught on to the big secrets of the story. The truth is, Partridge plays off of the expectations created by Ms. Jackson’s story and then goes beyond it. You aren’t at a disadvantage if you haven’t read “The Lottery” but there is subtext there for you if you have.

It is a short novel (the trade paperback edition is only 176 pages) with big print, nice margins and lots of white space between sections and chapters.

The story continues to resonate with me even weeks after having read it.

READALIKES:

Dark Harvest is like nothing I’ve every read before. I suspect it doesn’t even read any like the rest of Norman Partridge’s work.

For tone, you might try more of Mr. Partridge and check out Joe Lansdale.

While I mention Jack Finney’s The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the two books are rather different. Invasion is a calm love song to the ever-disappearing small town and the resilience of the human spirit. Dark Harvest looks at the gritty dead-end life and the darkness that can deaden the souls of people who live all their lives there.