Dark Harvest
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4.2 • 10 Ratings
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
NOW AN ORIGINAL MOTION PICTURE, AVAILABLE FOR STREAMING!
Norman Partridge's Bram Stoker Award-winning novel, Dark Harvest, is a powerhouse thrill-ride with all the resonance of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery."
“A major talent.” —Stephen King
Halloween, 1963. They call him the October Boy, or Ol' Hacksaw Face, or Sawtooth Jack. Whatever the name, everybody in this small Midwestern town knows who he is. How he rises from the cornfields every Halloween, a butcher knife in his hand, and makes his way toward town, where gangs of teenage boys eagerly await their chance to confront the legendary nightmare. Both the hunter and the hunted, the October Boy is the prize in an annual rite of life and death.
Pete McCormick knows that killing the October Boy is his one chance to escape a dead-end future in this one-horse town. He's willing to risk everything, including his life, to be a winner for once. But before the night is over, Pete will look into the saw-toothed face of horror—and discover the terrifying true secret of the October Boy.
“This is contemporary American writing at its finest.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
The setting: 1963 in a small Midwestern town, where every Halloween, teenage boys are forced to participate in a deadly tradition known as the Run. This involves racing to the church by midnight while risking being killed by the October Boy, a pumpkin-headed monster armed with a butcher knife. The winner’s prize? The opportunity to get out of Dodge! With this spine-tingling horror story, Norman Partridge offers a brilliantly fresh take on the monster story. We were pulling for his lovable loser of a hero, Pete McCormick, who’s determined to win so he can get away from his drunken father and leave his dead-end hometown behind—especially when he discovers shocking truths about the Run. Dark Harvest threw us for a loop—and we loved every second of it.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
At the start of this mesmerizing new fantasy from Partridge (Mr. Fox and Other Feral Tales), it's Halloween night in 1963 in Anytown, U.S.A., and the local teenage boys are ramping up for the annual hunt for the October Boy, a pumpkin-headed being cultivated by the town fathers to run the gauntlet each All Hallows' Eve. The boy who brings him down before he makes it to the local church wins a highly coveted ticket out of town and, as most believe, liberation from the stultifying ennui of small-town life that has crushed all ambition and dreams out of the adults. Pete McCormack is among the most determined boys on the hunt, but this evening he will learn horrifying truths about his town's tradition and the terrible price he must pay for his manhood. Partridge has always had a knack for sifting deeper significance from period pop culture, but here he brilliantly distills a convincing male identity myth from teen rebel drive-in flicks, garish comic book horrors, hard-boiled crime pulps and other bits of lowbrow Americana. Whether read as potent dark fantasy or a modern coming-of-age parable, this is contemporary American writing at its finest.
