Secret Dead Blog Recommends: Dark Harvest by Norman Partridge

It's October, and man, have I got a book for you. Scan the back cover copy of Dark Harvest (Tor, $12.95) and you'll see phrases like "Halloween, 1963" and "small Midwestern town" and "he rises from the cornfields." You might think: Okay, I'm in Ray Bradbury country, and that's a nice place to be this time of year. But no. It's not nice at all. Because Dark Harvest isn't about some quiet horrors playing out in the shadows of the American heartland; it's a full-tilt, mash-the-accelerator-into-the floorboards horror novel that you'll either read in one gulp... or clearly, you don't have a pulse. I don't want to go too much into the plot, because the joy of this short, moody shocker is enjoying the twists and turns as Partridge throws 'em at you. He grabs you from the first paragraph:

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

And from there, you'll be strapped in for 169 pages of the best horror movie you've never seen, trapped in a town with the strangest rite of passage you'll ever encounter.

I've been a Norman Partridge fan since reading his stories in Cemetery Dance and the various Best New Horror anthologies over the years. (Not to mention his two Jack Baddalach hardboiled crime novels, which are not to be missed.) But this one really made my jaw drop. Like any great novel, it'll ruin you for many others for a while.