“We do so many things for tradition’s sake…that few of us can remember why we really did them in the first place.”
—Jessica Cluess,
A Shadow Bright and Burning
Chronic Continuum
Ten years ago, I developed seasonal allergies for the first time in my life. Seven years ago, they persisted even after summer arrived. Ever since, I’ve lived with constant congestion… Sometimes you don’t notice when something’s wrong. You get so used to the obstacle in your way that you just think it’s part of the scenery. You learn to ignore the stuffy nose and itchy eyes because there are more important things to do than take care of yourself.
Though some of our cultural traditions are lovely, many are a lot like my allergy issue: problematic but improvable. And, as usual, nearly everything wrong with our current traditional practices can be traced back to animals. Even a fictional story set in 1963 where all the teen boys, ages 16-19, in a “podunk” Nebraska town head out each Halloween night, armed not with treat pails and good cheer but with machetes and a mission to kill the pumpkin-headed monster that resides in their cornfields. If they can’t kill him, or if he gets inside the church before midnight, the whole town will suffer, their way of life over for good.
But their tradition gets even darker. The winner—the boy who kills the creature known as the October Boy or Sawtooth Jack—believes he’ll be the only one allowed to leave town, his family set up with money and a nice house courtesy of the Harvester’s Guild, when in actuality he will become the next October Boy. After his victory, he’ll be killed and buried in the cornfield, revived the following Halloween night to perpetuate the cycle all over again.
Sawtooth Jack: Circular Torment
The October Boy is this story’s monster but not its villain, a horrifying midpoint reveal by author Norman Partridge, as protagonist Pete McCormick realizes that last year’s winner is this year’s October Boy. The truth dawns that what Pete had dreamed about—jumping the town line after winning the game to escape his alcoholic, unemployed father and the (figurative) ghost of his mother—was just that: a dream.
The leaders of the Harvester’s Guild hold the entire town captive, forcing them to continue this perpetual cycle. In a macabre, exceedingly cruel twist, they task the father of last year’s winner—who’s spent the past year pretending his son was still alive so the town’s children wouldn’t get suspicious—to resuscitate his kid’s pumpkin-and-vine body. The man who gave him life brings him back after death. He arms his son with a butcher knife—itself symbolic of carving living flesh into dead meat—and then releases him upon the town, so his son can kill his peers, friends, and neighbors. Brothers in suffering, forever.
In a perverse inverse of the October Boy’s fate, Pete is fueled by the vitality of youth, trapped in a house with a father who may as well be dead. Desperate not to become the same kind of failure, Pete starts Halloween night with a fierce determination to win. When his dad hands him the machete he used on his Halloween runs all those years ago, Pete rejects the sentiment. The machete symbolizes all that’s wrong with this town and his father—trapped in the past, clinging to old traditions, with no future besides the status quo. Immediately upon rushing out into the night, he heads to law-enforcer-in-chief Officer Jerry Ricks’ house to steal a gun, seeking to finally break free of the cycle.
As the story unfolds, Sawtooth Jack attempts to break the violent cycle himself. By telling a group of boys to run, he proves (to the audience) that he’s not a terrifying boogeyman but a real boy trapped in a bastardized body. The boys—scared and desperate to win, to escape their horrifying hometown—don’t heed his warning, forcing Sawtooth Jack to kill them. Their deaths aren’t for naught, though, as the October Boy takes their car and arrives at the church shortly after the run began, hours before his midnight deadline.
The presence of cars and guns, in both the novel and the 2023 film adaptation, represents an advance in technology unprecedented when the tradition first began. This proves to be the town’s downfall. By not updating their traditions to fit the times, everything the Harvester’s Guild worked so hard to build crashes down in flames.
Revolving Reality
Though a staple of the autumnal season, cornfields represent the cyclical nature of violent traditions in their own right. After all, how often do we stop to consider why most of the Midwest is coated in corn?
Though Partridge writes that all the ears are plucked and eaten before the night Sawtooth Jack rises, those of us with a mild knowledge of large-scale agriculture know that it’s not humans eating all that corn. It’s animals on farms, born to eat and eat and eat before being trucked off to a slaughterhouse. The town they’re trying to save with this macabre tradition is rooted in a system that is inherently violent. Each year, they grow corn to feed animals who will all be killed and slaughter their own children, so they can grow more corn to feed more animals and kill more kids. If they ever stop this wheel from turning, the entire system will collapse around them.
Like the boys in this twisted town, the animals that their corn feeds are nearly always killed in youth—ranging from hours old to five or six years—and the last thing both winners and farmed animals see in their pitiful lives is a gun approaching their head. But unlike the animals, Jim Shepard—a fitting surname for the final October Boy—is able to return the favor by unloading a bullet into his killer’s temple. That violent cycle, at least, has finally concluded.
Jerry Ricks: The Cruelty is the Point
Dirty cop to his core, Ricks and his enforcers at the Harvester’s Guild want the carnage to continue, if only for the sake of the violence itself. They alone benefit, lording their power over the town. But behind closed doors, they’re trapped in their own kind of suffering. When entering Ricks’ house, Pete sees the sad truth under the macho façade. His house a filthy mess devoid of photos or personal touch, it’s clear he barely takes care of himself. His entire existence is consumed by upholding the violent traditions that keep his town running.
Ricks can’t be considered happy, but he’s determined to ensure everyone at least feins normalcy. At the party after the film’s leading lad Charlie Shepard wins the run, there are no mourning families or friends or girlfriends. Showing the wrong emotions in this town is enough to ruin your life—as Pete’s father learned, in the novel, when complaining about the run one drunken night to Ricks, after which he lost his job—so they plaster on happy faces and pretend like everything’s fine.
But there are no lengths too far for Ricks, no line he won’t cross. On that fated Halloween night in 1963, Pete meets the only new person to ever move into town: Kelly Haines. Her father left town to serve in the war and never returned, starting a new life far away. Twenty years later, Ricks and his goons hunted him down, killed him and his wife, and brought Kelly back to live with her aunt and uncle. It’s not enough for only those who want to participate to carry on the tradition; everyone must obey, or face the consequences. As Kelly tells Pete, the October Boy isn’t the worst boogeyman in town. The violence of Halloween night seeps across the boundaries of time, infecting the people of the Harvester’s Guild year-round.
Paralytic Parallels
Ricks spews insults like carbon dioxide, more escaping with each exhale. He refers to the kids fighting for their lives as misfits, freaks, and other crude terms that don’t bear repeating. To live with the violence he inflicts on others, he must demean them, dehumanize them. Like workers on a farm or slaughterhouse using all variations of expletives—coupled with kicking, throwing, punching, and breaking—he must remove all sense of identity from them. He turns them into things to beat, use, and kill, rather than individuals with likes, wants, hopes, and feelings.
Not only does he freely throw punches and insults, but when necessary, he orchestrates the runs’ outcomes, too. Poor Jim Shepard, a misfit from the wrong side of the tracks, is chosen by Ricks to win the year before the events of the novel. He’s the kind of kid who could threaten the status quo if allowed to participate until the age of 19. Jim’s fate on Halloween 1962 is predestined by a man playing God, a man who gets to pick and choose who lives and dies. If history teaches us anything, it’s that people with the power to kill others with impunity will do just that. What’s that quote about absolute power corrupting absolutely? That’s Jerry Ricks to a T.
Pete McCormick: A Confusing Creed
Perhaps the most disturbing revelation in this story is not that the winner becomes the October Boy but that there’s no purpose to the tradition other than to carry it on each year. By the end of the book, Jim Shepard perishes and Pete McCormick escapes as the town burns behind him, a flaming lollipop at the end of that long licorice whip of a road. Seemingly, the horrible fate of which the Harvester’s Guild warned if the October Boy won is exactly what the boys of town all want: a way out.
The movie, however, takes a different tack, removing all mystery. Years ago, when the town’s teens failed to kill Sawtooth Jack, a huge dust storm blew in, decimating their cornfields. There is a very real reason for the tradition to continue, and a life-altering consequence should they fail. The question then becomes, not Is the town’s folklore even true? but Is the cost we’ll pay worth the blood of our children?
Spiraling Secrets
Unlike the open knowledge of Sawtooth Jack in the movie, his existence is nothing but whispered rumors among the book’s children. The boys don’t know for certain what they’re participating in until the October Boy crosses their path on Halloween night. Many of us, in the nonfiction world, likely don’t stop to consider the violence upon which our traditions—our societies—are built.
On Halloween, kids roam the streets in search of candies, caramels and chocolate coating their gums and burrowing between their teeth. The blood and bacteria of the cows is sanitized from the milk—their bloody, brutal deaths erased entirely—before it’s cocooned along with luscious cocoa and nougat and sugar in those filmy plastic wrappers that will exist forever on this planet, long after humanity’s last day is marked in the history books.
Though we are fortunate enough to not experience the worst horrors of these traditions ourselves, we have the option to change them whenever we want. While there may be personal sacrifices or consequences for doing so, we should be at least willing to ask ourselves the kinds of questions the townsfolk of Dark Harvest never did: Is our belief in the necessity of certain traditions true? and Is the cost of continuing these traditions worth it?
On my mind: “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson
It’s probably cliché to fawn over Shirley Jackson’s most famous short story, but I can’t help myself. “The Lottery” is a masterpiece—one of the best stories I’ve ever read. Like Dark Harvest, it challenges the idea of tradition and doing things because they’ve always been done. Not only that but it gives readers permission to say that, yeah, actually, some traditions are bad. Dangerous. Even if we aren’t the ones paying the ultimate price, even if we benefit from them, they still create wounds in our society that will never heal.