Friends… I have been on a bit of an adventure. The other day I saw some commentary from a friend talking about the movie Dark Harvest that came out earlier this month. The poster for it seems rather compelling and being a huge fan of Children of the Corn it piqued my interest. This was released as a rental on streaming platforms and got a live screening at the Alamo Drafthouse. So in another place and another time this likely would have been a major theatrical release, but in the weird place we are in at the moment it went “directly to home video”.
Then I read the fateful words on the poster… that it was “Adapted from The Award-Winning Novel”. 2023 has been the year of the book for me, and I am currently reading my fortieth of the year. Given how drastic movie adaptations can veer from the original material, I figured I would take a pause in my reading of Agency by William Gibson and give this novel a try. In the worst-case scenario, I bounce hard and simply watch the movie like I was going to originally.
This was a bit easier said than done because apparently, Dark Harvest has been a VERY popular name for novels. Some further research led me to the fact that the first one in this sequence is the one I was looking for by Norman Partridge. The “Award Winning” in the movie tagline relates to the Bram Stoker Award for Best Long Fiction from the year 2006. So yesterday morning I popped over to the Libby App and luckily one of the three libraries that I have a card for had it available. The novel itself is really more of a novella given that it is only 176 pages in length and I was able to easily read it over my lunch break.
Dark Harvest tells a tale that isn’t necessarily unique, but it does so in a really visceral manner from the perspective of an omniscient narrator that you learn more about as the tale comes to its conclusion. It is a tale of a suffocating small town, with bitter meanspirited people, and a yearly ritual that holds a dark secret. It is a novel that contains a “twist” but one that is pretty easily guessed and outright explained well before you have reached the halfway point. It is a novel with a deep sympathy for the monster, more in the vein of Frankenstein than Pumpkinhead. The town and more specifically the Police Officer stand in opposition against our trio of anti-heroes as we the readers root for them to succeed. Things may not be tied up in the neatest of bows at the end… but it was still fairly satisfying. More than anything this is a novel that rebels against the “things have always been this way and have to stay that way” narrative of small-town America. As a product of deeply rural “one horse town” America, I at least found it satisfying and immediately identified with the narrative of wanting to leave at any cost. That is precisely what I did… once I was gone, I was gone and I didn’t even come home on the weekends.
The movie however does what Hollywood always seems to do… and mercilessly fucks with the story. By the time we are ten minutes into the tale, it is already barely recognizable from the source material. While the novel is a tale of rebelling against dark traditions… the movie leans significantly more into the monster movie genre. As a result, you end up with this sort of what if Lord of the Flies happened during the Purge where the kids who all look like Back to the Future 1950s extras go out and wage war against Pumpkinhead. The only pieces that remain from the Novel, are the most basic building blocks of the plot… the October Boy, Starved Children Pressed into Service to Defend the Town, and the townsfolk enabling or at least turning a blind eye to the whole process.
I am not saying Dark Harvest is a bad film, just that it has very little to do with the novella that spawned it. It seems to constantly be flipping back and forth on this border of taking itself way too seriously, and cartoonish levels of nonsensical violence. For example, I give you the “bloodsplosion” which is a truly nonsensical scene where apparently the monster brutally murders an entire cellar worth of kids who have tried to hide away from “The Run”. Nothing that the monster could have done… would have caused this giant fountain of blood to come crashing out of the cellar, but we have it nonetheless as a weird hamfisted callback to the elevator scene from The Shining maybe? There is zero sympathy for the devil here… as Sawtooth Jack is just a mindless abomination that must be killed. There is some attempt to pin a message on at the end… but the delivery just does not really work with anywhere near the same gravity as it does in the novel.
I am not saying it is a bad film. So long as you go into it with the knowledge that it is going to be a movie with an easily guessable twist that makes some oftentimes interesting stylistic choices… you will probably enjoy yourself. That said after watching it… I fully understand why this went “directly to home video”. I think the biggest sin that the movie does, is doing a poor job of representing the novel. That however often seems to be the case, especially with horror adaptations. It isn’t that the novel itself is the best thing I have ever read, but it is good enough that I would suggest it, especially considering how quick of a read it is. I am less certain however if I would recommend the movie. This is maybe one of those situations where you would be better off watching the movie first, and then reading the real story afterward if you found the premise at all compelling.
So yes… I am damning this with the faintest of praise. If nothing else it was an interesting journey that I went on yesterday. The novel if nothing else has some really damned good lines in it. I will leave you with my favorite:
words don’t matter unless they are walking the hard road to the truth
Good Morning Folks! I stayed up fairly late last night to finish The Hero of Ages, the final book of the first Mistborn trilogy. This was the first series by Brandon Sanderson I had read, and I guess I can now say I am a fan. When I get into a series, it is often because I fall for the setting more than the characters, but in this novel, it was probably a combination of the two. I genuinely like the characters in this series, and they will be characters that I remember for eternity. I do find the original artwork a bit jarring because this is not at all how I pictured either character. I never would have pictured Vin as Battle Ready Shannon Doherty, and I always pictured Elend as Edgar Figaro from Final Fantasy IV. I guess that is always the challenge with books… your brain associates images with everything that rarely matches up to the later visualizations. Given that I consumed these in digital form, I was not quite so confronted by a book cover at every turn to cement a specific impression.
This has been a bit of a wild ride as far as years go because I went from maybe consuming two books in 2022 to now having finished my thirty-fifth. It feels like in many ways I am making up for lost time, because while I have always loved books and bookstores specifically… I never really forced a place in my life to read. I always had something else that was going to take priority and the only other time in my life when I really voraciously consumed books was when I got into the Dresden series several years back. It is bizarre how the simple act of wanting to get a current Library card created this chain reaction of getting access to the Libby App and then burning through a chain of books.
While I really want to read the sequel series that takes place after Mistborn, I think I am going to dive into something a little bit more chill for the moment. I just consumed two multi-book epics back to back, so I think I need to read a singleton for the moment. Given that I started with Scalzi’s lighter fare, I plan on giving Starter Villain a try tonight. I have no clue how long of a read this is going to be, or more so how quickly I will move through it. It sounds great though, and I have seen a lot of folks giving it praise on the Fediverse. After that, I think my plan is to probably pop into the next book in James Butcher’s Unorthodox Chronicles series as it released on the 10th. The first book was a bit of a mess and took me a while to get into it, but once I settled in I enjoyed it enough to keep reading the series.
Some other books that I am looking forward to are Rubicon by J.S. Dewes, because while I would rather have the next book in The Divide series… I enjoyed those books enough to try out something else by them. I have no clue when Alecto the Ninth is going to release, but whenever it does I will likely drop everything else and switch over to that as I am very sold on that universe and more specifically the characters of Gideon Nav and Harrowhark Nonagesimus. I thought book three of Linday Ellis’ Noemena series would be coming out soon, but while the book has cover art and everything… it appears that maybe it won’t be released until next summer. We have no clue at all what is going on with the Dresden Files series and while there is a tentative title for book 18, I’ve not seen anything regarding potential release dates.
There is always the Iron Druid Chronicles series that I could return to as well, and absolutely intend to at some point. I enjoyed Hounded quite a bit in a very Not-Quite-Dresden-Files sort of manner, but I’ve just never actually gotten around to reading the second book. I know in November I will make a beeline for Bookshops and Bonedust the next book in the Legends and Lattes series from Travis Baldree. There is also a bunch of stuff from N.K. Jemisin and Sangu Mandanna that I want to explore as well. After that, I have a whole slew of books that have been orbiting in the back of my brain and can essentially endlessly keep pulling forward as needed. This year really has been the year of the book for me. As always though you can follow my journey over on Bookwyrm.
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Good Morning Folks! I’ve been back in my happy place each evening of curling up on the sofa with my laptop and usually a cat and listening to an audiobook while I played copious amounts of Path of Exile. There is just something about having two different parts of me engaged at the same time that brings me joy. Mechanically I am happily grinding away at whatever objective I am focusing on in the ARPG, and then mentally I am having a story told to me. It brings me back to happier days as a kid of doodling while listening to storytime. Yesterday however was a bit of a sad day because I started the morning thinking that I would go home that night and start the next book in the Old Man’s War series by John Scalzi after finishing up the previous one Sunday night. Then I realized… I had no more books in that series. For whatever reason I was thinking that another “space opera” series by that author was connected.
That bummer moment however should not blunt the joy I felt consuming this series. Looking back at my Bookwyrm account, I started the first book on August 26th and wrapped up the last on September 17th. So that was most of a month of chilling out with an ARPG and a book and enjoying life. I guess really if you think about it there is a primary trilogy, a book that retells the last book in that series from a different perspective, and then two different anthologies fleshing out the world from a wide number of different but connected perspectives. Through all six books, a cohesive tale is told, even though no single book keeps the same central character throughout the entire story. This is legitimately my favorite part of the series. It is telling a story of a world more than it is telling a story of a single person, even though the same cast of characters keeps popping up regardless of the scenario.
In many ways, it reminds me of another obsession of mine from when I was a bit younger. I stumbled onto Santiago in a battered paperback form at a used bookstore in college and I mostly picked it up because I liked the cover and the “A Myth of the Far Future” tagline. To the best of my knowledge that “major motion picture” never happened. In truth, the novel was something like the 11th book in the “Birthright” series where Resnick created this entire universe out of disconnected novels. Each one focuses on a specific legend of the far frontier, so you might be hearing about a character in one book… and then pick up the next in the series and it is from their perspective. The thing is… Scalzi is just a better writer and gives his characters far more depth and personality.
I didn’t particularly care about any of the characters from Santiago or any of the other dozen or so novels I read in that series, I cared about the world. With Old Man’s War, I feel like I have a personal relationship with each character that the story focuses on. Even when someone seems outwardly evil, you find out that maybe there is a bit more behind that story. There were several times in the story where an entire alien race was considered to be the villain… but we as the reader were given a viewpoint into one particular member of that race to help explain their actions. This elevates the storytelling past hero/villain iconography to something grounded in experience and emotion. My sadness when I realized I was out of books… comes from the fact that I wanted to know more about these rich characters.
Before this year I had never consumed anything by John Scalzi, I am taking a break from his work and diving into another author that I had never read anything from. I am not entirely certain why I chose Mistborn over any of the other series by Brandon Sanderson, but I did and started it last night. It took me a few chapters to switch gears from space opera to fantasy thieves but I think I am on board now. I know absolutely nothing about this series other than the name that kept popping up periodically in my timeline. So far it reminds me a little bit of Locke Lamora, but not enough to shape my opinion. There are already a few characters that I like, and a few others that I dislike but I feel like that is probably intentional. The mythology of the world seems rich, so I am probably going to enjoy it. That is very much a thing for me… I need thick worlds filled with cultures and symbology to keep me going.
Anyways… time for me to wrap this up and move on with my day. If you have never read the Old Man’s War series by John Scalzi it is most definitely something that I would recommend. I am sure in another month’s time when I have consumed all of the books available in Mistborn series I will give you my opinions of that as well.
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One of the challenges with this whole “goes super hard on books” pattern that I seem to be in, is that it does not exactly translate to an easy steady drip of content to write about. It feels really weird to sit down in the morning and essentially say “yup books”. From the standpoint of “talking about them when I’ve finished them” is great, but the whole me being in mid-flight thing is not exactly a delightful spectator sport. At this point, I am about half the way through Lies of Locke Lamora and it has grabbed me enough to make me want more. However, I also don’t really want to talk about the book as I am experiencing it, and rather will just batch up those thoughts once I have finished it.
One thing I did find out is that apparently there is an order of operations that must be maintained within Bookwyrm, and if you want a book to count towards your reading goals it has to hit the “read” shelf at some point. I ended up moving Nona the Ninth to my “Books of 2023” shelf and then “finished reading” and it completely skipped the goals queue. I had to do a bit of backpedaling and “finish” the book again to get it properly slotted as my 7th book of the year in my “20 books” goal. Other than that general weirdness, I am enjoying Bookwyrm quite a bit however I wish its federation worked a bit more as I was expecting. I thought maybe I would be able to follow my Bookwyrm account and then boost the comments that I leave when I finish a book. However while I am following myself, I never see any updates even when I drill down into the profile. A friend suggested that I check out Storygraph so I might dive into that at some point because it seems like it would potentially be a good recommendation engine.
I am trying to branch out a bit of late and do things that are not “Path of Exile Delve” while consuming an audiobook. So far doing events and map completion in Guild Wars 2 seems pretty drift compatible for the sort of interaction that I am looking for. Essentially an activity that flows nicely with listening to an audiobook needs to be one that is mechanically satisfying but asks nothing really of me to grasp narratively. Working on the main story or expansion quests doesn’t really fill this role, but all of the assorted drop-in group activity does beautifully. I’ve been trying to get into the habit of doing Tequatl at a minimum, and then knocking out my daily objectives and farming the three guild halls worth of resources as well as my home instance. For a long time, I have felt like I really wasn’t making much progress financially in the game, but there is a neat add-on for BlishHud that tracks “coin” earned during your session and it seems like every night I am clearing about 5 gold in an hours worth of time.
I’ve also been trying to ease back into playing Final Fantasy XIV more frequently. What I really need to do is get started on leveling my crafting or working on beast tribe quests again… but what I am actually doing is running retainer missions and fucking around liberally. One of the giant obstacles in front of me is the fact that I need to spend some serious time cleaning out my retainers and sorting out the gear that I actually might want to keep for cosmetic purposes from the dross that I should just turn in for company seals. I also noticed that apparently, I am no longer the highest possible rank in my grand company, so I guess I need to sort out how to change that. There are weird minion boxes that I cannot seem to purchase.
What I REALLY need to do is get into the Hunt Train nonsense, because they are super lucrative and also just enough activity to feel like I am doing something meaningful in the game. I have greatly enjoyed this activity in the past, and I need to probably ease back into doing it more often. It might even be a reasonable option for leveling alternate jobs. I only actually leveled Paladin to 90, but did manage to pull everything up to 80 before burning out in 2021. Hunt trains are a great way to get some gear to level those classes up easily as maxed Crystarium gear will pretty much hold you until you hit the level cap.
All of that said… I still actually am playing a lot of Path of Exile. I find the mechanical loop that I have fallen into deeply relaxing. I play the Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer until I fill up my sulfite and then play my Righteous Fire Juggernaut down in Delve until I run out of that resource again. I continue to periodically liquidate cool things I found down in the dark for profit and as a result, I have over 7000 Chaos Orbs and another 20 or so Divine Orbs. That is without me really going out of my way to do much other than these two activities, and passing up a ton of smaller trades because I am busy and don’t feel like stopping what I am doing for 5 chaos. I think more than anything I learned a lot about the trade economy in this league and feel like there will never be a point in future leagues where I struggle to gear myself.
With all of that… I somehow managed to cobble together a blog post on a day when I was not feeling particularly like blogging. Sometimes in life, you just need to start writing and eventually, it will coalesce into something hopefully worth reading. That I guess is the benefit of Tales of the Aggronaut being a blog about “me”, and less about any one particular subject. Hopefully, yall are having a delightful week out there, and if so… I hope it keeps on that trajectory until the weekend. If you are not, I hope whatever stresses are haunting you, ease the fuck up.
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