The sixties. A nameless town. A dead cornfield. Every year on Halloween, someone walks into that withered field. They wake up the figure known as Ol’ Hacksaw Face, Sawtooth Jack… the October Boy. They carve a face into its pumpkin head. They stuff its threadbare clothes and vine-riddled body full of sweets. They hand it a butcher knife. They point the way towards town.
A group of hungry, restless young men anxiously await the freakish figure’s arrival. They know the only way out of this dead, dusty town is by killing the October Boy before the night is over. Pete McCormick, hungrier than most, is among these boys full of adolescent hubris and bravado.
A long, storied, bloody tradition.
He doesn’t realize it just yet. None of them do. But this Halloween, the October Boy is about to break that tradition—and everything Pete thought he knew about their town’s way of life.
Norman Partridge’s Dark Harvest is a lean, mean, no-nonsense novel that not once went where I thought it would go—and was all the better for it. I went into it expecting nothing more than a straightforward supernatural slasher, but encountered instead a surprisingly soulful, mournful story about the terrible things people learn to live with. And while I understand how that subversion of expectations might disappoint some readers, it definitely worked on this one. I very much dug this gloomy, grisly yarn.
Dark Harvest is, at its candy-covered heart, about a town being slowly consumed by its traditions. What began as a ritual ostensibly intended for the benefit of the community has, over time, eaten away at its soul. The townspeople are aware of this, to some extent, and yet they continue the practice, as much out of complacency as custom. They don’t know another way of life.
Until this year’s crop of kids. Until last year’s October Boy.
The October Boy himself was another pleasant surprise. Rather than the mindless, murderous machine I expected to find, Partridge gives us a genuinely tragic, sympathetic figure who owes more to Frankenstein’s creation than to any masked, silent slasher. He ended up being one of my favorite aspects of this story.
The other was the writing itself. Partridge’s prose may not be for everyone, but I found its rustic, casual quality appealing. It’s very reminiscent of Stephen King’s writing, particularly in the way it captures the peculiar cadences of small rural communities. Partridge gives that familiar style his own distinctive spin, though, with a narrative voice that’s disarmingly intimate and amusingly chummy, providing an effective contrast to the much darker, more somber tone of the story.
My only real reservation comes from the fact that, despite its brevity, Harvest somehow also manages to be a bit repetitive. Some of this is intentional, with Partridge returning to certain lines and phrases for poetic effect. Some of it, however, simply belabors the same points with slightly different wording. This tendency becomes particularly tedious around the novel’s halfway mark, when the otherwise propulsive plot slams on the brakes to accommodate several (several!) lengthy, melancholic monologues that drain much of the tension the story has so carefully built.
Thankfully, Partridge recovers a lot of that momentum in time for an explosive and entirely gratifying finale. I enjoyed this strange, surprisingly sentimental story a great deal. Good stuff.