Black Harvest

Dark Powers #1

by Ann Pilling

Colin and Prill were looking forward to a holiday of fun and adventure in Ireland. It would have been perfect if only they hadn't had to drag along their cousin Oliver. But Oliver, it turns out, isn't their biggest problem. Almost from the moment they arrive, Colin feels sick from an awful smell, so powerful and horrible that it seems to be rising from the land of the dead. At the same time, Prill is visited by a strange creature creeping into her dreams. Who is she, and what does she want? Only Oliver seems untouched by the danger. As the hot summer days continue, their terror mounts and their baby sister becomes critically ill. Oliver links the present horror with the terrible famine in Ireland of the 1840s - and the strange occupant of the nearby caravan, whose land was lost then through eviction - and he must bring about the reconciliation to save himself and his cousins.

Genres: Horror, Childrens, Young Adult, Classics, Ireland, Halloween, Paranormal

196 pages, Paperback

First published October 13, 1983

About the author

Born in 1944 in Lancashire, British poet and children's author Ann Pilling read English at King’s College, London, where she wrote her thesis on C.S. Lewis' fiction. She has published over thirty books for children, one of which - Henry's Leg - won The Guardian Prize for Children’s Fiction. She has two sons, six grandchildren, and currently lives in the Yorkshire Dales. Since 2003, she has concentrated on writing poetry, rather than fiction.

Reviews

[nettebuecherkiste]

2,5. Unangenehmes Buch. Der Bezug zur Potato Famine war gut, aber sonst hat es mir wenig gefallen. Auch das Ende ist wenig überzeugend.

[Capn]

The West Coast of Ireland is a perfect place for a holiday - until everything begins to go menacingly wrong...

Colin becomes aware of a ghastly stench from the land - a smell of death and decay...
Prill is haunted by a fearsome skeleton-woman, who crawls through her dreams in hideous torment...
Baby Alison falls sick with a strange and sinister illness...
And their cousin Oliver? In those stifingly hot summer days, as some nameless evil from the past begins to close in on them, Oliver remains unnaturally, unnervingly calm...

(back cover)

As Clare and others have already reviewed this book very well (mind like a sieve - I liked the reviews at some point, then utterly forgot them!), I'll keep mine brief. Clare's warning about parental support is a good one - this is one grim and upsetting Armada paperback. And it doesn't help that the afterword gives the horror the historical green light, so to speak.

Very well constructed and full of awful imagery, smells and textures. If you're a dog lover, there are a few moments of anxiety. But there are other, worse horrors here, and a pervasive feeling of helplessness. I'm betting this will have scared (or scarred?) many children in its time.

I don't think I need to read anything more about The Great Hunger. This has been a very effective primer...

Thanks to Len for recommending this to me. Very unsettling!

[Clare O'Beara]

This is a creepy fantasy tale on the lines of Elidor, in which the unreal and scary start to seep into real life. Three young people are staying in a seaside cottage in the west of Ireland. A brother, sister and their cousin. The mother of the siblings is also present and her small baby, and an unfortunate dog.

Feelings of foreboding along with heat, mustiness and a horrible smell ruin their plans for a good summer, and the baby frets. The dog goes off her food and the kids don't get along. Alone of all the houses around, their newly built cottage has a non-working telephone, and the electricity goes off as well. Milk keeps spoiling. A scary old man in a caravan nearby, the cheery farmer, a hot and bothered priest and a drunken retired doctor all make an appearance. But it's the other people you want to watch for, the ones who haunt dreams or stop you on the road and beg for food....

As I'm Irish I saw in no time that we were getting references to the potato famine caused by blight during the 1840s. The kids are from England, visiting, so it takes them longer to catch up with history. This is a good book to introduce children to the concept of tragedy among a whole populace. I read it in a sitting, but a young reader might be stopping and coming back, and would find themselves dreading picking up the book again, yet needing to continue to find out what happens. Anyone over ten should be okay with it; under that I advise parental guidance.

[Mary Haines]

Mrs Pilling was my English teacher.

[Molly]

This creepy story takes place in Ireland round the 80's, when a family vacationing in a rural bungalow become victim to poltergeist type of activity. After the father leaves, the children begin to have nightmares and hallucinations. They see starving people, and their food goes rotten immediately. Without a car, and with the help of some climatic storms, cut off from all communication, they slowly begin to starve and sicken. This is a good book to teach about the Potato Famine, while giving students the sensational ghost stories they want and love....

[Dylan Gifford-Parry]

I honestly feel in two minds about this one. An apt way to describe it is “what a compelling story. I hated it and I never want to read it again”.

As far as I can tell this is a book that’s written and designed for children to read and modelled after neo-Victorian fiction and in that sense I cannot understand where a kid would enjoy reading this. It’s too slow and grounded to be engaging and it’s too dark and genuinely distressing to be entertaining. I can’t really go into details without spoiling it so I’ll just say it’s foundations seem somewhere in the edu-tainment area. The problem is, while it’s educational it’s NOT entertainment. At least, in the way it’s set out to be.

Maybe it was just me going in with no expectations but this book was legitimately one of the most difficult I’ve ever had to read despite the prose and short length. The descriptions of suffering these children face is horrible in a way that doesn’t want to make me continue reading. After a certain point there is no hopeful banter or optimistic view to overcome the evil presence of the book. The kids just suffer and struggle to understand what they did to deserve it. It’s probably first book semi-aimed at children I’ve ever read where the children genuinely try to just give up and accept death and curl up and die. Multiple times.

Even though I respect the ambitions here and it is genuinely a well written and compelling gothic story it’s one that I don’t want to read again. The misery in this story just seeped into me as I read it and I felt miserable as it wrapped itself up, content in the feeling the suffering the characters endured was justified to some extent. I’m sure to someone out there that means it’s an incredible story and deserves high praise but, as someone who typically doesn’t mind coming back to dark or challenging material this one was just uncomfortable in a way that very few things have ever made me feel.

Like I said, it’s a good story that I never want to read again.

[Charlotte]

This book read like a creepy horror movie. It's written so visually. That only made it spookier for me which I loved.

I was a bit let down by the ending though. So 3 stars.

[Caroline]

3.5 stars!
A quick and interesting spoopy read. Though I found the ending was a bit predictable.

[WallofText]

Had to read this for class and it was actually pretty gripping! The time it is set in is a bit odd and a few things were a little unsatisfactory to me, but the atmosphere was brilliantly unsettling and the mystery really compelling. Overall a fascinating read!

[Natalie]

Horrifically bad book. I kept hoping that it would get better but it never did. Read the blurb and you know the book, you'll be bored less and you will save yourself a lot of time. Nothing happens! So some kids go on holiday, they are miserable and all their food goes off too quickly and there is a bad smell... that's it... What is interesting about that?! My life is more interesting! I have fruit rotting in my fruit bowl that smells bad which is more exciting than this book!!

[Particle_Person]

This is an outstandingly good book. It's one of the few YA ghost stories I've read that can still scare me as an adult — it's genuinely creepy. If you're a writer, you should study the way Pilling gets her effects. I'd say more but if I discuss them they won't work as well. ;-)

[Adam Stevenson]

I picked up Black Harvest with a bunch of other children’s books at a charity shop and decided to read it as a little capper to a month where I’d read something big and difficult, I wasn’t prepared for it.

Black Harvest is a visceral book, strange, cloying and possibly one of the creepiest books I’ve ever read. It starts with a family holiday. The dad has a job in Dublin and mum, Colin, Prill, baby Alison, the dog and strange cousin, Oliver go to a holiday home on the West Coast of Ireland. The house is new, but it feels wrong, there’s this weird smell, everything seems too hot. The cousins feel hungry, weak, sick and baby Allison, normally a happy child, won’t stop screaming. Even the dog, a blaze of life, is listless and keeps throwing up. Prill has horrific nightmares of a skeleton woman eating mud and spewing. Only Oliver is okay.

Oliver is, however, obsessed with building a den, a deep hole in one particular area near the house. Things ramp up, Prill sees her nightmares in the day - there’s one scene in the corner shop that is riven with horror and disgust.

Of course, a reader with a sense of history will be picking up the clues, especially the hunger pangs and the food all rotting before the family can eat it. The horror comes from ghosts of the Great Famine, the nightmares Prill sees are drawn from real accounts of the time and the things they feel are the results of famine. This doesn’t make the book less horrific but more, the evils that are being visited on this family are not imagined but things that actually happened.

Of course, it’s because some of the victims are buried near the house in unhallowed ground, the moment when a flood draws the bones from the ground is another striking image. It only takes recognising the evil done to people and putting them to rest to resolve everything - but the intense, physical nature of the suffering that the family feel is so sharply drawn that it brings out the suffering of people during the famine.

While the book has a happy ending, it does feel that the characters would never be quite the same again - so it was surprising to me that this is the first in a series where they encounter other historical horrors.

Black Harvest is a short, sharp shock of a book which lingers long after it’s over.

[AintGotTimeToRead]

Was this a "horror" story or was this literary fiction?
Are all the events actually happening within the narrative? or is it some sort of communal hallucination bought on by the radiant heat perpetually described to the reader?

Until the closing chapters I wasn't sure what to believe. This insecurity makes it hard to invest in the reality of the narrative and the circumstances affecting the family. Adding to the discomfort are events that become repetitious, and the prose staid; words blur, events merge, subtext evaporates. Summit fever takes hold as you almost glance over words racing to the finish.

But then a post script delivered by the author becomes an elegiac honouring. Black Harvest becomes a memoir for 1 million lives lost during the Irish potato famine. Her horror story has a bloody beating heart, hammering for those who died to poverty and hunger. An earnest regard for a ravaged populace that never truly recovered.

It is a shame that this subtext is flattened by an uninteresting plot. But the books status as literary fiction, and the doors to history that open from within the pages just about justify its position as a book for the ages.

[Ljwatts]

Written originally in 1983, I don't think this has aged well. I appreciate the attempt to shed light on the 19th century potato famine in Ireland, but I thought the plot was repetitive. The family feel ill and hot, boy do they feel hot! This was mentioned every other page. They also endure bad smells and feel sick. I don't think I've ever read a book with so many instances of vomiting. I thought the withdrawn character of the cousin, Oliver, was the most interesting and showed the most development but otherwise I was glad to see the end of the story.

[Jono McDermott]

So dull. And so miserable. Bad things happen and they keep on happening, and the grand reveal at the end is: this is all a not-so-subtle history lesson. When I picked this book up, I thought it was for children, since the protagonists are children, but it is very much NOT for children. I give it three stars for commitment to history, but it is not a fun or easy read. Despite being under two hundred pages, it took me over a month to force myself through.

[Amanda]

This is quite an enjoyable — and terrifying at times — short YA novel. It's actually pretty scary for a young adult novel. The terror is a rather slow build, but there were several movements when I was truly horrified, which is something I've rarely experienced from a novel before. I also loved the weaving of Irish history throughout.

[David]

I really enjoyed this. I have been reading a lot of King, Herbert, Barker, Lovecraft and a lot of classic horror novels over the last few years...and I just wanted to say, this really gave me the creeps. I started reading it to my two young sons only to realise it was a bit beyond them. Then I got really hooked and couldn't put it down. There something very visceral about her descriptions and as a big time horror enthusiast. This ticked all the boxes.

[Tim]

One of the most eerie, ghostly, disturbing and intriguing books I have read recently. The collision of past and present was enjoyable. Tense throughout, but perhaps let down by a slightly too abrupt resolution.

[Signor Mambrino]

Did not enjoy this at all.

[G]

POTATO BOOK

[Joshua Ball]

Great children’s horror story

[Hollie]

A bit of a nostalgic read for me this one. I was 13, I think, when I read this last.

[Irina Kuzmina]

I knew nothing about this book or its author. I simply picked it up thinking it might be a nice Halloween read — and I’m very happy with my choice. The writing style is easy to follow, and the story is built up nicely without too many characters or unnecessary plot twists. I even felt a chill at a few moments, so it made for a great spooky read for October.

The story was heavily influenced by The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845–1849, and the historical tragedy of the Irish famine becomes the main background for Black Harvest. In the end, the book feels like a brief window into a well-known historical catastrophe, offering a chilling glimpse into the horrors that took place in Ireland in the mid-19th century.

Overall, Black Harvest turned out to be a pleasant and unexpected discovery — and it even added The Great Hunger to my “want to read” list.

[Tom]

I loved this book when I was growing up. I read it in an afternoon and couldn’t put it down. I was disappointed not to enjoy it as much as I did when I was eleven but this is probably because it does not have the crossover appeal of the last book I read. Still, this is a pretty terrifying ghost story and the increasing feeling of dread is well controlled up until the finale.

[isa c.]

3.85