Many works of fiction have featured an Angry Mob scene, but arguably none have employed one to the same extent as Norman Partridge’s 2006 novel, Dark Harvest. The entire plot of the book concerns such eruption of chaotic, hyperviolent street justice. An anonymous Midwestern town acts out a black ritual every Halloween night: the teenage male population of this rural remote is charged with executing “a pumpkin-headed monster,” the October Boy, preventing the cornfield emigrant from reaching the old brick church in the town square by midnight. This ritualistic slaughter is carried out in the interest of continued community existence: the town secures “what it needs to get through another year of raising prize crops from the same old dirt, what it needs to turn those crops into cold hard cash–the whole deal delivered with a king-sized platter of blessings from above or below, depending on who the hell you listen to.”
Locked in their bedrooms unfed for the five days leading up to Halloween night, the teens are whipped into a feeding frenzy. When finally freed for the Run, they are armed to the teeth, wielding “baseball bats and pitchforks,” “butcher knives and two by fours studded with nails,” “bows and arrows and axe handles and scythes.” The teens thrum with dangerous energy, bashing porch-set jack-o’-lanterns as they roam the streets (warm up for the potential showdown with the October Boy). Armed guards posted outside the town’s market, diner, truck stop, and liquor store cannot always serve to curb the mob’s wild appetites–outbreak of deadly food-looting occurs. A gross violation of the rules, which decree that that the teens stay hungry until the dirty deed of leveling the walking scarecrow is done. Then the grim feast can begin (as demonstrated by a flashback to the prior year’s Run): “They came by the dozen, and they ripped the Boy apart and chowed down on those treats buried inside him.”
Partridge compares the imprisoned (pre-Run) teens to “bulls penned up in tight little chutes.” Hitting the streets at last on Halloween, they are described as “running in packs, like dogs turned loose for the hunt.” The figuration of the mob scene grows even more explicit: “Of course, the October Boy knows what stands between him and the church. Packs of teenagers roaming the street like armed villagers in some old Frankenstein movie.” But apropos of a novel in which crossing “the Line” (marking the town limits) is thematized and the distinction between categorical opposites is deliberately blurred (in “a town where winning is just another name for losing“), Dark Harvest does not stick strictly to the Universal blueprint. For all his repeated likening to Frankenstein’s monster, the October Boy is no dumb, lumbering brute. He exhibits admirable craftiness in outfoxing his antagonists, leaving his Halloween-candy viscera as trail bait, and sneaking into town behind the wheel of a hot rod stolen from one of the teens. Frankenstein’s monster famously gets torched inside the old windmill in the climax of the 1931 movie, but the October Boy uses fire to his own arsonist advantage: he sparks a series of blazes as strategic distractions that draw the teens away from the church (and which ultimately combine to engulf the town in a cataclysmic inferno). The “reaper that grows in the field, the merciless trick with a heart made of treats, the butchering nightmare with the hacksaw face,” the October Boy is the very embodiment of contradiction and terrible turnabout. By the sweet, vengeful end of the novel, he is the persecuted monster who beats (with a last-minute assist from protagonists Pete and Kelly, who have discovered the Run’s sinister twist) the angry mob at its own rampaging game.
Not your average Crew of Light: a stoic, gun-slinging “bounty killer” (“hunter” doesn’t do justice to this man’s relentlessness), a burly German blacksmith, a Mexican dynamite-man, a profane preacher, and the narrator–a scorched, disfigured wretch who managed to escape from a scene of nightmarish captivity. Their dark destination: the eponymous pool, located in a sepulchral underground cave, and the home of a vampire queen and other bloodsuckers cursed long ago during a search for Indian gold. Vampire Lake is one of the greatest settings Partridge has ever created, and the heroes’ journey down to it is marked by stunning descriptive passages (e.g. “The place was like a throat filled up with whispers, and they washed over the big stone gullet and hushed past us on their way to the narrow grave of a mouth above. Thanks to Indio’s dynamite, the iron gate that corralled the vampires’ corner of the world was now a twisted mess. That gate had once been a hell of a sight, scored with chains the blacksmith could never have cut, and spikes set with dead men’s skulls and tattered human hides that flapped like scarecrow warnings in the subterranean breeze.”). The narrative takes several intriguing turns: the bounty killer is haunted by his past slaughters in a most unusual (and visceral) manner, and the spectacular climactic battle with the vampire queen and her undead attendants (as albino alligators in the lake are stirred into a feeding frenzy by the carnage) presents a surprising, but extremely satisfying, twist. As the Top 31 Countdown has demonstrated time and again, Partridge has a special talent for penning unique vampire tales and weird westerns, and this deft combination of the two constitutes a double-barreled blaze of storytelling glory.