Amazon.com: Customer reviews: Dead Harvest: A Collection of Dark Tales

Couldn't stop reading until I finished...

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 21, 2014

I started this book early yesterday morning, read straight through the day breaking only for coffee & dinner...there is such a variety of stories all horror of course but as they are written by different writers, each one is unique in its own way. I stayed up until midnight reading, woke up at 4:30 this morning and just finished the book. I would absolutely recommend this book to anyone who enjoys a good scare, getting a little creeped out, or just likes a book you can't put down. As with any large collection some of the stories stood out more than others, but I enjoyed them all..I have no negative feedback, it is a great collection.

13 people found this helpful

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Jake

Growing tired of the harvest

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 20, 2017

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There are so many stories wedded to a theme that gets tiresome, it became tedious and a chore. That's not to say I didn't
enjoy some stories, but not enough to move it from two stars to three. If you are going to build a massive dark tale collection around something, make it more tantalizing than harvest.

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Laligirl tif

Depressing and sophmoric.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 30, 2016

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Very depressing short stories and not very original so there was little saving grace. Maybe this is why I had never heard of most of the writers.

3 people found this helpful

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Donna M.

Don't waste your money buying this book!!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 15, 2016

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Don't waste your money buying the book, read using kindle unlimited. A few good stories but most sucked.

2 people found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

Four Stars

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 19, 2017

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Liked it.

One person found this helpful

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Booklover Deb

Well done collection of the darker side! Very interesting ...

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 28, 2014

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Well done collection of the darker side! Very interesting short stories with all sorts of twists and turns. The collection is well put together and the cover is very artistically created, drawing in the reader.

8 people found this helpful

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miss sandy

very few chills

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 9, 2015

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Sorry, not scary

5 people found this helpful

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larry garber

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 15, 2016

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I love books like this. They are the best short stories. Love the book

4 people found this helpful

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Kindle Customer

A huge selection of horror shorts, some stand out, some ho-hum..

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 19, 2014

Dead Harvest is a collection of 50 individual stories from different authors, all designed to chill and thrill the reader. I find it SO hard to rate anthologies because there is always stand out stories, okay stories and then stories that are just not that great. It never seems fair on the writers who have contributed something great to get a lower rating due to others alongside. However, I shall rate and review dear reader!

ITS ALWAYS DARKEST BEFORE THE HARVEST!

Each year, as summer quickly fades to memory, and the sky begins to grow dark, and the leaves change color and fall, the faint, fetid scent of death—of slowly rotting things—begins to drift in, hanging on the chill air like a ghostly pall. Making us wonder, what the coming harvest will produce. Well...the harvest is here. And it is dead.

Think corn fields, scarecrows, harvest time, crops then add in creepy stuff, scary stuff, horrible stuff, graphic stuff, death, decay, rot, rebirth and retribution. I think that gives you the general picture?

Overall I only found a few of the stories in this collection even remotely scary, and that was a little disappointing, some of the stories I finished and was saying "is that it?" as the story had very little impact, others stood out as being a cut above and did get the chill factor happening for me. I just wanted to be scared more, terrified more, disturbed more than what I was (weird person I know).

So, I will share with you my stand out stories from this collection, these are the ones I would rate 4-5 stars and really loved:

Retribution - Dana Wright
Hodmedod - Stuart Keane
What Lurks Within the Darkest Wealds - Matthew Pederson
Harberry Close - C.M. Saunders

And, these were my stories I liked, not quite the standard of the above but still good and enjoyable 3 star stories:

Red Fuel - Jonathan Templar
Ablation - M.L. Roos
House of Nettle and Thorn - Todd Keisling
Nails - Jeff Strand
The Flower Dies - Kyle Yadlosky

As for the rest, could take or leave really. It's a large collection of stories so I am sure there is something in here for everybody. I did find reading similar themes in many of the stories got a bit repetitive at times, seen one harvest or corn field, seen them all kind of thing, if you know what I mean.

Overall, again, struggling to rate it overall I will give it 3 stars, it was good but did not have the terror and scare factor (for the most part) that I was really wanting from it.

21 people found this helpful

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gaz

A Treasure Trove of Great Stories

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 23, 2014

I have been a reader and collector of horror story anthologies for over 40 years. Usually collections featuring multiple authors are of uneven quality - even collections of the so-called "classics". Nothing prepared me for the uniform high quality of the stories in Mark Parker's 50-story collection "Dead Harvest". I am 20 stories into it, and to say that I am enjoying the book is an understatement. These stories - many from the pens of authors I was not familiar with - are consistently well written, creative, unique, and feature complex, sympathetic characters and compelling plots that have kept me turning the pages. Reading this really large collection, I feel like a little kid under the Christmas tree, knowing that each brightly wrapped package contains a delightful surprise. "Dead Harvest" stands up to comparison with the best horror anthologies that have been released over the years: Peter Haining's "The Unspeakable People", the "Creeps" and "Not at Night" collections from the 1920's and 1930's, the best of the Pan Horror anthologies, and the great Hugh Lamb collections. I predict that "Dead Harvest" is going to be a topic of conversation among horror aficionados for years to come.

The stories . . . where do I start? I found this collection in the first place because I was seeking stories by Dana Wright. Dana, as her fans know, is a gifted writer. I greatly enjoyed "The Asylum", a short novel which is currently available at Amazon. So I started with Dana's "Retribution". The beauty, the intensity, the gripping horror of the story held me spellbound. "Retribution" is a heart wrenching emotional and paranormal experience and features a father who makes the incestuous dad of Forrest Gump's young girlfriend seem like a choir boy in comparison.

After "Retribution" I skipped around, choosing the titles that sounded most promising. The next 19 stories I selected were extremely good. "Raincatchers" by Greg Gifune is a harrowing tale about a pair of transient serial killers. Even though the girl who joined them in their predatory wanderings was no saint, I found her fate to be sad and poignant. She was more lonely and misguided than evil. Both "Learned Children" by Ronald Malfi and "Bringing in the Sheaves" by Richard Thomas feature scary, unpleasant children with ominous secrets and deep manias - you never knew what hideousness would be sprung on you next. "Villianwood" by Benjamin Kane Ethridge is one of my favorites - the pathetic story of a single mother saddled with a deformed young son whom she is both devoted to and repelled by, and the Villianwood tree that engulfs their home, trapping them inside with the strange elf-like creatures who have taken up residence in the attic, is a one-of-a-kind imaginative tour-de-force. Another ultra-imaginative weird tale is "House of Nettles and Thorns" by Todd Keisling, about two college room mates who are lured to a sorority party by a beautiful coed, only to find themselves enmeshed in a strange and deadly ritual being conducting by creatures whose only ties to humanity are their appearance and ability to speak English.

Two more favorites are "Peter Peter" by Christine Sutton, about a hideous revenant who rises from the grave at night during the harvest season - the anniversary month that the farm hand Peter was wrongfully lynched for the disappearance of a young girl - and extracts a bloody revenge on the posterity of his tormentors; and "The Old Cider Press" by Gregor Cole,which features a scarecrow-like orchard spirit who can only be appeased by human sacrifice - and the villagers who are intent on making sure the victims are visitors from out of town.

"Husks" by Angeline Trevena is an evocative story about a young couple visiting the husband's family farm only to find the parents missing and the creepy forces behind their disappearance closing in on them as well. "Hodemod" by Stuart Keane features a beautiful young newlywed with anger management issues who is not about to take her husbands infidelity - and the disease that came with it - sitting down. This story is written in a particularly intense, gripping fashion.

"Autumn Lamb" by E.G. Smith tells of a type of sickly, emasculating immortality that turns out to be worse by far than persevering through life in our mortal coil; "The Man with the X-ray Eyes" by Richard Chizmar relates the story of a man dedicated to eradicating the alien creatures among us that only he can perceive - alien creatures that seem a lot like normal pretty girlfriends and harmless neighbors to this reader. "Uncle Sharleviox' Epidermis" by Gregory Norris tells the tale of a dead scientist whose unnatural living skin coats the walls of his family mansion - and the purpose it was put there, which threatens the prospects of his unsuspecting nephew.

"Into the Trees" by Tim Lebbon tells the poignant story of the criminal Toby, who returns dying of a stab wound to the stomach to the hollow tree that served years ago as the trysting place with the girl he loved before he was abducted by a criminal mob: a nostalgic return to the site of the only happiness he found in the course of a brutal life. "Katy and the Green Boy" by Lori Safranek relates the sad encounter of a five year old girl with the ghost of a young boy who was tragically killed in a harvesting accident years before. "The Last Harvest" by Jaime Johnesee takes place on the planet Mars, where the evil elders of a colony of earthlings exploit the colonists and establish an annual ritual where virgin girls are sacrificed to a sanguinary Martian god. But the seeds of revolution are in the air . . .

How many other wonderful, intriguing stories lie waiting for me in this collection? I will find out soon. To editor Mark Parker, if this book is a sign of the quality we can anticipate in future anthologies, my bookshelves will be full.

18 people found this helpful

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5 star		19%
4 star		24%
3 star		20%
2 star		32%
1 star		4%

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