 Well I finished it. Hello everybody, E here. Welcome back to another book review. I finally finished the most expensive novella I ever purchased. I think I got this thing for $16.99 on Amazon. There's no discount whatsoever for it. This is Dark Harvest by Norman Partridge. If you've been a fan of the channel for any length of time, every Halloween I've tried to read this book. I've gotten a little bit farther every single year. Last year I got 50 pages before I finally forgot I was reading it and just never picked it back up again. And this year I said, damn it, I'm going to finish it. And I finally finished it. If you want a more in-depth review of everything, like I said, I go very in-depth on my Goodreads Review. I'll leave that down there in the doobly-doo. So if I could just say I didn't like it. In fact, I think the thing that I don't like the most about it is it's not really a Halloween story. Yes, it happens on Halloween. Yes, it's about a sentient pumpkin man. But it doesn't feel like Halloween. There's so much missing here. There's so much atmosphere that is missing. It reads like a mixture between like Battle Royale, which might sound awesome, but in this case not. Battle Royale, The Lottery, The Long Walk, or even a bit of The Running Man. Probably more The Running Man than The Long Walk, honestly. The only thing I really enjoyed about this book is the ending, the last 30 pages, but the book's only 169 pages long. You've got to get through that first 139 before anything really pops off and gets really interesting. The concept is okay. I enjoyed the concept and the ending, even if the concept is super overused. Like I said, The Lottery, The Running Man, The Long Walk, The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner, all that stuff. I mean, it seems like every single author takes this on at some point in time, takes on this theme. Now, you guys know, once again, if you've been a fan of the channel for any amount of time, if you just watched my last video, my review of The Night Will Find Us, I mentioned the three things I look for when I read horror. That's character development, pacing, and dread. There's no dread. This is more of an action movie kind of situation, like I said, Battle Royale. It's more like that than it is a horror novel. There's some horrific stuff in it. There's some carnage, there's some blood, guts, that kind of stuff. There's actually no character development whatsoever. Some of the characters don't even make any sense. There's a girl thrown into it, and there's not supposed to be girls out on this night. And the villains are so cartoonish and just over the top, bad, terrible villains, especially the cop. He's one of the worst villains I've ever read, hands down, period. In fact, I did a top five worst villains of all time. He'd be up there. And as far as the pacing goes, here's where we're going to get into the meat and potatoes of why I dislike this book. The book head hops from, and it does have, let's say, page breaks for when you're going to different characters. But you'll be in one character's mind, and all of a sudden, Partridge just deviates and meanders into this droning second person narrative that is just, it's so unneeded and just so superfluous. It aggravated me. It actually annoyed me. Every single time I read it, I was like, oh no, not this shit again. And sometimes he would go on and on for pages before he would get back to the story. And he knew this was the problem. Because once you get to those last 30 pages, you don't see that anymore. It stops completely. And he finally tells his story. I have a feeling that I don't want to say that those scenes were added, but they just felt completely out of place. They felt like they were tacked on at the end to fill the book out. They feel like filler. They do. But that just absolutely kills all forward momentum. Every single time he does it, it kills all forward momentum. And I just, it had the whole thing been written in second person. I wouldn't mind it nearly as much. But you go from close third person perspective to the internal thoughts of these characters to an omniscient narrator that does a second person thing like, you know, kind of like King's Needful Things. You've been here before. Imagine if Stephen King did that throughout the entirety of Needful Things. But this one, it was always something jarring about this second person narrator coming into it. And it just aggravated the hell out of me. I am going to give this two stars because for me it was just okay. My biggest complaints are the writing. It's just, I don't think I'll ever read anything else by Norman Partridge. If you guys know of other books that he's written that he doesn't write like this, and I would assume that he has, please leave him down. I'm not even sure that I want to try him, but let me know some other things. If there's any books of his that you liked, that you read, that you enjoyed, that don't have the intrusive second person narration. Another thing is, this is kind of like the epitome of why I don't care about Bram Stoker awards or Splatterpunk awards or any of these awards, any of the horror awards that are out there. This is a great concept. It is not a great book. It is a great cover. It is not a great book. And it feels like that's all you really need for Bram Stoker award is to have a great concept. Nobody cares anything about the delivery. This is not good. It's not fun to read, at least not for me. And I'm starting to drone on just like Partridge did, so I honestly and truly want to know if you like this book, why? I don't get it. If you enjoyed the second person author intrusion, please let me know why, because I've liked it before. I didn't like it here, so I'm not a second person hater. There is a joke of friends don't let them write in second person, but I don't mind it so much. It can be well done. I've seen it well done, but this ain't it, especially when it intrudes into a close third person and it just comes out of nowhere. It adds nothing to the narrative. I went back and read whole scenes and just skipped over the second person narration and it read just fine. It literally just be cut out completely, but then you'd only have like 100 page book or 120 page book and you can't charge 1699 for 100 page book. Well, you can Stephen King, but it would come down. So yeah, have you read Dark Harvest by Norman Partridge? Please leave your comments down there in the doobly-doo. Let me know why you liked it, why you hated it, especially if you liked it. I would love to hear why anyone liked this. This is highly recommended by authors that I respect, but it does have a blurb on the front from Peter Straub that should have been a warning. He says, Partridge is probably the most exciting and original voice in horror literature to have appeared in the last decade. Peter Straub says that about every single horror author he has ever blurbed. Probably the most important, the best horror author. He says it all the time means absolutely nothing coming from him. So I should have known that it was going to be basic or that there was going to be issues with it if Straub liked it. But anyways, let me know down in the doobly-doo what you thought. Until next time, I have been Ian, you have been Ian, I hope you guys are having a good spoopy season. I'll talk to you guys next time. Bye-bye!