Something is coming for the children.
Tim Waverly, a young teacher, escapes London’s spiralling housing costs by becoming a live-in caretaker at an abandoned orphanage. But his arrival triggers a series of frightening events.
An ancient evil has awakened. A new Harvest has begun.
As Tim and those around him become engulfed in a dark nightmare, he is forced to confront his deepest fears in order to save countless innocent lives.
The Harvest is a work of terrifying imagination from a new voice in horror. Both frightening and deeply moving, Alex Hunter’s debut novel will linger long after you turn the final page.
Dark bleatings, my hunting tribe! We’re talking about a debut novel today, which I always find exciting.
We start with Tim, a school teacher, who resorts to moving into an old orphanage as a sort of caretaker, because he’s having some financial troubles. This solves a housing issue for him. However, money becomes the least of his worries as soon as he realises that there’s a reason the orphanage was available. We also have a couple of teenagers in the mix, who are into spooky occult stuff. Their paths inevitably cross in this story of ghostly, spiritual, monstrous weirdness.
Let me get what I didn’t like out of the way first (I hate this part). Now, I should stress that I think this is a good debut, certainly better than the first novel I wrote, which I decided not to publish. What I think let this story down a bit was that it was perhaps a little too ambitious – it felt very big in scale and the further in I went, the looser the character’s motivations felt to me. My main criticism is that though there’s a great amount of external struggle, which I thought was mostly captivating and handled in interesting ways, there was a lack of internal character struggle for me. Beyond that things were just happening to the characters, I didn’t find that there was much motivating them except that they found themselves in certain situations. I prefer a bit more complexity and more layers, not necessarily in every character but definitely in the protagonist.
What I did really like was the kid character, Sanjay, and his arc. I was the most interested in him and every time I got to one of his sections, I was hooked. I found the rest of the characters quite likeable and easy to relate to, and the setting was creepy. This story does use dreams – and you all know how I feel about dreams. I say this every time it comes up but my aversion to dreams in stories is absolutely nothing to do with the author or the particular book. However, I will say that considering my level of unfair and unreasonably strong hatred for dreams, I did not find them egregious here (whatever that’s worth!).
Overall, I thought this was a very decent first novel with a lot of great ideas and most certainly a great flair for horror and how to handle it. There are shades of Stranger Things here too, I think.
If you’d like to check out the book or the author, I’ve popped some links below for you:
Bleeeeat!
Happy Goat Horror 
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