“There ain’t no stop signs on the black road.” – Dark Harvest (2023)

Over the years, there have been lots of books that changed my life and influenced the path that I would take as a writer, that led me from there to here – wherever here is. One of those is Norman Partridge’s The Man with the Barbed Wire Fists from 2001.

I don’t know how I got turned on to Partridge in the first place, but The Man with the Barbed Wire Fists almost literally saved my life, helping to pull me out of a particularly dark place and reminding me of what writing was capable of, when you were willing to give it full throttle.

From there, I tracked down a lot (though probably not all) of his other published work, and devoured it as hungrily as the boys in Dark Harvest devour the innards of Sawtooth Jack. Which means that, by the time I got to his 2006, Bram Stoker Award-winning novella Dark Harvest – the place where most people I know first arrived at his work – I was already deep in Partridge’s writings.

When my second collection came out from Word Horde back in 2015, Norman Partridge was kind enough to give it a blurb, which remains one of the crowning achievements of my career as a writer.

A cinematic adaptation of Dark Harvest has been in the works for a long time. In fact, it’s my understanding that the film itself has actually been in the can for some time now. Like Trick ‘r Treat before it, the studio seemingly didn’t know what they had, and opted to just put it on a shelf for a while, then unceremoniously dump it into release.

Of course, Dark Harvest is no Trick ‘r Treat. If that movie was like an Amblin Entertainment picture gone sour, then this is the raging Halloween mask of a bildungsroman like The Outsiders. All metaphor for the dystopia that was and is small-town America.

As I said on social media right after finishing the movie, it’s been a minute since I read the novella, and though it is undoubtedly Partridge’s most famous work, it was never my favorite. So I can’t compare the movie with the book very closely, except to say that the ending was definitely changed in ways that honestly feel less cinematic, which is certainly puzzling.

While I can’t say how accurate Dark Harvest is as a literal adaptation of the book, however, I can tell you what it gets right about Partridge’s work in general: That sense that anything is narratively possible, if you’re bold enough.

Partridge always repurposed pop culture and greaser nostalgia into smooth-running engines in a way that felt absolutely effortless, but what he did that was much more important was to take swings that felt too big and make them, instead, seem obvious.

That’s something that David Slade’s 2023 version of Dark Harvest gets right, regardless of what else it may get wrong. Right or wrong, it’s a bold, weird, vivid, striking Halloween movie that is packed with punk rock references and feels like an engine thrumming underneath you the whole time. That the engine never really opens up and flies down the road is certainly a mark against it, but most movies never even get this far.