Still getting myself back in the swing of reading, and looking for any books that immediately pique my interest with their premise so I’m motivated to read them immediately! On a recent jaunt to my local B&N, the short horror novel Dark Harvest (2006) by Norman Partridge caught my eye.

Even though the book originally came out in 2006, I imagine it was displayed prominently because a movie adaptation is coming out online on October 11! Furthermore, as the cover indicates, it was the winner of the Bram Stoker Award for Best Long Fiction of 2006, so it was definitely worth checking out.

The novel is set in a nameless midwestern town, surrounded by cornfields, on the night of Halloween, 1963. For five days, the teenage boys of the town have been locked in their rooms, and allowed no food, leaving them ravenous and nearly deranged when the sun sets. Then they are released by their families, armed with knives, pitchforks, clubs, or whatever other weapons they can find, and they spread out into the darkened streets and alleys.

Their mission? To find and kill the October Boy, a monster that emerges from the cornfields on Halloween night that has a jack-o-lantern for a head and a body of vines… and a butcher knife in its hand. They boys of the town must kill the October Boy before he reaches the church in the center of town and the clock strikes midnight. If one of them succeeds, he will earn prizes for his family and the one thing that almost every young man wants: a ticket out of town. If they fail, doom will befall the town. The October Boy himself is not a passive victim, and the teens are hunted as well as hunters.

Pete McCormick has just turned sixteen and this is his first chance to kill the October Boy. Desperate to escape a life of midwestern drudgery, he is willing to do whatever it takes to bring the legendary creature down. And he has a plan, a strategy nobody else has tried before. But before the night is over, Pete will find himself and his beliefs challenged by others in town — and the October Boy himself.

Dark Harvest is a short, fast-paced novel, clocking in at about 170 pages. It jumps right into the action, with the release of the October Boy from his field and Pete from his home. From there, it follows a number of twists and turns, and though I anticipated part of the trajectory of the story as it unfolded, it was told in such a compelling way that I didn’t mind.

Incidentally, it reminded me of a movie, Ready or Not, that came out in 2019. In Ready or Not, a young woman marries into the wealthy family of her dreams only to find that she is now subject to a twisted tradition where she must survive a deadly game of hide and seek until dawn (and the movie, fyi, is fantastic). The details of the story are sufficiently different from Dark Harvest, but both stories poke dark fun at people who follow old traditions without thinking. Shirley Jackson’s classic story The Lottery (1948) falls into this category as well.

Dark Harvest is a fast, fun, compelling novel, and well-worth reading if you haven’t already.