Bloody Books Review: Dark Harvest
We return to the Warhammer Horror Imprint* with Josh Reynold’s Dark Harvest. With so many of these now in the stable, it could be easy to miss out on some of the truly fantastic atmospheric entries into the line that are out there, of which there are actually many.
Dark Harvest is sinister, a tale of old gods** and faith lost whilst delving deep into what the realm of Gyhran is and how life there manages to exist against such overwhelming odds. We follow one Harran Blackwood, a former Warrior-Priest of Sigmar and now nothing more than hired muscle scraping out a living in a noir-ish style, taking jobs from all angles. A message delivered to Harran whilst he dwells in Greywater Fastness that stirs up elements from his past life. from here, possibly with the intent of murdering the sender of the missive, he travels to the dark, damp and distressingly eel-centred town of Wald.
Dark Harvest is not a book of scares and spooks, but rather one of oppressive atmosphere and ever-present darkness hanging over the land, which in itself is a place of gloom and constant rain, surrounded by dangerous swamps and disgustingly lethal plants and animals, watched by the dark eyes of the Sylvaneth, populated by the sour faces of distrusting townsfolk. Wald is a place that has as much character as the actual people of the tale, and thus is a wonderful place to explore the concepts presented here, namely how mortals can exist alongside the immortal, the predatory nature of the Realm, contrasting faiths and coming to terms with your own history.
The novel opens up the setting in a slow and gradual nature much like the mystery that sits at the core of the book, slowly unveiling parts and responses to early sections, with Blackwood’s fish out of swamp water placement being the perfect eyes to truly understand the grinding life that these (variously awful in many ways )Townsfolk lead. Blackwood comes at the world from a bitter and fatalistic mentality , oddly relatable in the dry wit that cements him as one of the best of the AoS setting, especially when played off against Gint, the black-humoured drover that appears throughout the tale.
Oddly, there is no sign of Chaos here, and the Gheists that appear on the fringes appear to be there to show that Blackwood is able to see them clearly when his peers cannot shows that there is more story to dig into, but unfortuntly there has never been a sign of a follow-up, more so when the full story of Blackwood’s nebulous past is not to be seen here, and holds very little in forming the horror in which he uncovers here, but with something this evocative, and this engrossing, it’s hard to fault it. It is both a book of small details and one that can be recommended to anyone who has not yet jumped from the Old World to the Mortal Realms.
*That’s if we every truly leave it on this site
**With familiar names for long term Warhammer Fantasy fans