Evil Harvest [Mass Market Paperback]

Great horror story! Good characters(no whiners)and the action starts on page one and keeps rolling! Settle in, lock your doors and don't be surprised if you sleep with the lights on!
Happy Reading!

This is one of those "something evil lurks in this sleepy little town" horror novels that seem to be so popular now. It's almost its own little sub-category of the horror genre! I like them, although I tend to prefer the more `personal', individual type horror stories (a haunted house, or one little ghostie or beastie after one protagonist, etc).

Matt Crowe has returned to his hometown of Lincoln, New York with one thought in mind: to exact revenge on the inhuman, predatory beasts who control the town and live in human form, feeding on the locals intermittently until once every one hundred years they go on a `harvest' and wipe everyone out. Matt's parents and kid brother were killed by the creatures years before, right in front of him, and their ringleader is none other than the town's police chief. He finds a partner for his efforts in Jill, an ER nurse who is a newcomer to the town, and learns for herself all too quickly that she's moved to the wrong place.

This is going to sound like I'm picking on male horror writers and I promise that is not my intent. It just happens to be the first observation that came to me: that in recent years all of the books I've read by male, usually-American horror writers read almost identically. By that I mean it's almost as if they're written by the same guy. My personal theory is that there are a lot of Bentley Little impersonators out there! The horror genre has long been a near-dead genre in America, and Bentley Little's contributions to the genre in the last decade, giving it a little boost, has obviously not gone unnoticed. Michael Laimo, Briane Keene, Scott Nicholson, this Anthony Izzo, and about a dozen others all write in a very similar vein, with `voices' so identical that I would certainly not be able to distinguish one from the other. I don't know that this is necessarily a bad thing, and mimicry is probably 90% of the publishing world anyway. It's just an observation.

I do have a few complaints about this story in particular. Firstly, it seems to have originally `ended' about 100 pages before it actually did. It felt like the author deliberately dragged the story out simply to get more bulk. It also ended very strangely. I won't give it away, but it just appeared to stop in the middle of a paragraph. It wasn't an `end'. The cadence was all wrong and very jarring. It's also very remiss in the fleshing out of the main characters. They're your typical American hero/heroine prototypes, with no depth to them whatsoever. What depth is attempted is all told, not shown, and is distinctly unimpressive. Jill has an overbearing mother. Oh boy, THAT'S a new one! I just couldn't bring myself to care too much about what happened to either her or Matt, and the author's job is to make me care.

All in all I'll give this a C. Not failing, but a long way from good. The author has good pacing but needs to focus on character development, learn the fine art of `less is more' and `showing' vs. `telling', and cut back on the tedious details like how to load a gun and what the characters ate for dinner. There's potential here, though.

I have been so awed by Anthony Izzo and his style of writing, and Evil Harvest doesn't disappoint. Izzo has a style of writing that is easy to read and is a lot like watching a good old fashioned horror movie with the lights out. He works hard at creating characters that you come to love and those you come to hate and he stays true to each character throughout the story, something many authors struggle with.

Evil Harvest is about a small, quaint town called Lincoln, situated in New York. Matt Crowe has been gone from the town he calls his home for many years. His parents and little brother were murdered by a pack of strange, horrifying creatures. One of these creatures just happens to be the chief of police, a guy named Rafferty. Matt is raised by his beloved aunt and a nasty, violent uncle. Matt leaves home to put his past behind him, but returns to visit his aunt and discovers that life in Lincoln is no better than it was when he left and the creatures are still living among the residents. The one sure way to identify who is a monster is by a strong sulfur odor that can be detected when you get close to them. Harry and his wife; Liza, run the gun shop and after Matt encounters a monster attacking a young woman in a warehouse, he, Harry, Liza and Jill (the woman he saved) set out to rid the town of Rafferty and his creatures.

Izzo molds a fantastic story and answers all the pertinent questions but he doesn't answer everything, which is a nice touch. He leaves questions to be answered by the readers imagination. For instance, he never tells you where the creatures come from or how they came to live on earth. Another thing I like about this author is he is not afraid to kill off whoever he needs to in order to advance his story and make it better. This is not a fairytale with an automatic happy ending. Please give this book a try. It will have you turning the pages as fast as you can get them read. You will cheer, cringe, scream, and hang your head in despair before the end of the book. It will leave you getting close enough to sniff at those around you. This is what horror was meant to be.

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