Reviews with content warning for Gun violence - Dark Harvest

Solid Halloween offering, plays on tropes you've seen before but with enough difference to surprise. Partridge's prose is delightfully weird; long meandering metaphors or snappy comparisons both ring true and keep the story moving, keep the pages turning. I'll look for more of his stuff.

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zachisreading's review

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adventurous challenging dark emotional hopeful mysterious sad tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.25

Dark Harvest is a book made for Halloween. A mysterious town, in the middle of nowhere that on the surface feels like any other Midwest farming center in the late 1960s. You have a theater, a school, and a church right in the middle of everything. You might be excused for believing the place to be very white bread and even a bit boring. Then you hear how the town locks up its teenaged boys for nearly a week leading up to Halloween without food. Then, Halloween night, the boys are sent out on the hunt.

The book follows the hunt flashing between perspectives, eager to keep you off balance for the 169 pages of bizarre horror fiction. Mysteries are piled on mysteries, but the characters all only seem to want out. There will be twists and turns to take at breakneck speeds, but precious few answers as the book races towards the explosive climax.

With all the racing, many elements of horror never really sink in until the book is over. By then the frights have lost much of their impact. The characters seem equally forgettable. It's not that what they went through isn't still capturing my mind, but that they all seem to blend together in a mixture of anger and despair, never really differentiating one person from another. They are not badly written. Our view of them is just limited to the point of uniformity.

This uniformity also strikes in certain acts of obeisance that make you question the integrity of the story. The backstory, indeed, are the shaky stilts the majestic manor is built upon. Looking too closely at them could make you not want to go in. Yet the grand internal architecture and furnishings are well worth it.

Even with its many flaws, Dark Harvest is the sort of book that could easily be closed after the last page, turned over, and read again. Definitely a Halloween staple.

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