Dark Harvest cover art

Dark Harvest

 Preview
LIMITED TIME OFFER

3 months free
Try for £0.00
£8.99/mo thereafter. Renews automatically. Terms apply. Offer ends 31 July 2025 at 23:59 GMT.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.

Dark Harvest

By: Norman Partridge
Narrated by: Vikas Adam
Try for £0.00

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Offer ends 31 July 2025 23:59 GMT. Cancel monthly.

Buy Now for £7.99

Buy Now for £7.99

Confirm Purchase
Pay using card ending in
Switch payment method
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.
Cancel

About this listen

"This is contemporary American writing at its finest." (Publishers Weekly, starred review)

Winner of the Stoker Award and named one of the 100 Best Novels of 2006 by Publishers Weekly, Dark Harvest is a powerhouse thrill-ride with all the resonance of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery".

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....

©2007 Norman Partridge (P)2020 Macmillan Audio Horror Scary

Listeners also enjoyed...

 The September House cover art
Land of Bones cover art
Spooky Stories: Vol. 1 cover art
The Creeper cover art
Gone to See the River Man cover art
The Troop cover art
Nightblood cover art
My Heart Is a Chainsaw cover art
Dungeon Born cover art
The Ruins cover art
Thin Air cover art
Slewfoot cover art
The Tale of Halcyon Crane cover art
Seed cover art
Led by Beasts cover art
To Dust You Shall Return cover art

Critic reviews

2007 World Fantasy Award-Finalist

2007 Short-listed Bram Stoker Awards-Winner

“Probably the most exciting and original voice in horror literature to have appeared in the last decade.” (Peter Straub)

“A major new talent.” (Stephen King)

“This is contemporary American writing at its finest.” (Publishers Weekly, starred review)
All stars
Most relevant  
Hard to get into at first. Listened to the end. Found the narrator hard to listen to. This is my first ever audio book though.

Not bad. Just not brilliant.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
It's a short story but it didn't keep me engaged, unfortunately. The story/premise isn't bad, but I just wanted to know more about what was actually happening and I don't think it delivers (I don't know, I might have zoned out and missed the reasons why!). It is guessable what the one revelation in the story is, too. Just needed some background/lore as opposed to more gore.

Didn't quite capture my interest

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
The story idea seemed intriguing but while I waited for it to kick in, the cliché heavy writing just got more and more ridiculous as if it was a written by a school child. I listened right the way through, laughing at some of the lines, cringing at the shallow characters who had no motive for doing what they were doing only to be given the ending that the rest of the book deserved. A lame shoot out and everyone disappears into the sunset. The poor reading of the book only amplified the poor writing. It sounded like someone attempting a style of a cinema trailer voice-over on every... single... line. I never want to hear this guy's voice again and certainly won't read anything else by this author. Laughably poor.

Cringe, shallow, nothing more than an interesting idea

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.