Dark Harvest
Norman Partridge
Cemetery Dance Publications
172 pgs, Hardcover, $40.00″

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

Gear down and motor up, big daddy, we’re about to kick this pumpkin into overdrive.

Norman Partridge’s Dark Harvest is one of the fastest, funnest, fan-freaking-tastic novellas I’ve read all year. I’m talking total immersion as the right reverend Partridge chucks you face first into a baptistery of napalm and pumpkin chum, and holds you under hard until you grow yourself up some gills.

Hell-la-lujah my brothers and sisters and a-pumpkin-men!

I just can’t come up with a hyperbole strong enough to match this double-barrelled pumpkin-ball blast of entertaining terror. Imagine if Ray Bradbury bent Joe Lansdale over in the heart of a Stephen King cornfield underneath a full moon candle-lit jack-o-lantern carved in the shape of a Lord of the Flies pig’s head and you are closing in on the howling wolf October fantasy that Partridge has concocted.

If you dig Halloween and horror; if you’ve got a pulse and a brain and an appetite for well-crafted terror; if you’re a fan of acceleration and teeth-chattering full tilt boogie momentum grab this book hard and hang on tight.

Don’t stop until you reach the town limits.

Yours in horror,

Steve Vernon