The Usually Great Scott Produces a Mediocre Work

(The Usually) Great Scott Produces a Mediocre Work

01/17/2005

Nicholson, Scott. The Harvest. New York: Pinnacle-Kensington, 2003. 383 p.

The primary problem with Scott Nicholson's The Harvest is that it reads like Stephen King's Salems' Lot, or like the average Dean Koontz fare. This is unfortunate because Nicholson is a talented writer, as he has shown in his short fiction (Thank You for the Flowers) and in an earlier novel (The Red Church). The former shows the author's versatility for the strange story, which is not horror in the most traditional sense, but is eerie and often thought-provoking, a la Ray Bradbury, Rod Serling, and Robert Aickman, while the latter, which is more traditional, deals with family secrets such as betrayal and guilt, and with the horror of a human being who comes to believe he is divine. The magic of these earlier Scott Nicholson works is that they cannot be categorized.

One cannot say the same of The Harvest. It is way too easy to categorize. It is a cross between the typical zombie story, like George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, and the typical alien invasion tale, such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It lacks the punch of either classic, and it doesn't even come close to being as interesting as its predecessor, The Day of the Triffids. Granted, it has an interesting monster, which is always a prerequisite for any good horror text. However, The Harvest suffers from being formulaic and overwritten. In other words, the novel comes across as being written with other novels in mind, as if Nicholson was trying hard to reproduce a prototype.

For example, it suffers from having a huge cast of characters, as if Nicholson were writing with King or Peter Straub in mind. The reader is lead to think that psychology professor Tamara Leon is the protagonist of the story, but she is left undeveloped as a character, for Nicholson has to spend the bulk of his time fleshing out other, less interesting characters who serve no other purpose ultimately than becoming plant-like zombies. Where a writer like Dan Simmons (Summer of Night, Carrion Comfort) can do this successfully, Nicholson's devotion of so much story line to minor characters detracts from the novel. Although I sense that what he was doing was creating a tale where the community itself is the protagonist, I had trouble coming away with any sympathy for the characters because just as I was about to develop an affinity with any one of them, his/her story would be yanked out from under my feet, and someone else's would take its place. Of course, if I can't sympathize with any character, then I get to the point where I don't really care what happens to any of the characters. Hence, I lose interest in the story, and that is what happened with The Harvest.

Then there's the monster itself. While the reader is bombarded with some fifteen or so subplots, he/she is never given a prolonged glance at the alien life form which is the impetus for The Harvest. What the reader is told is the same information, ad nauseum: the half-plant, half-animal alien is hungry. And the zombies that the alien creates are just as repetitive. Nicholson informs us again and again that they think it is wonderful to be "one with" the alien life form, and to become a member of the plant world (albeit a moving, thinking member). Even though the alien is not evil in and of itself, here is very little complexity in the novel's treatment of this formless Lovecraftian creature.

But perhaps what irks me most about The Harvest is Nicholson's choice of silly words to represent horrific concepts. Tamara Leon is somewhat psychic, and can sense that something is not quite right in this small Appalachian town. Rather than use these intuitive senses to eerie effect, Nicholson simply refers to them constantly, and--unfortunately--calls them "the gloomies." I'm sorry, but a horror novel that refers to "the gloomies" some 30 times in its first 50 or so pages is only going to find itself degenerating into unintentional comedy. It also doesn't help that Nicholson chooses the sound "shu-shaaa" to represent the alien's communications. To begin with, let's face it, this is a rather silly sound. And (although it is hard to fault the writer for this) "shu-shaaa" just happens to be Dale Gribble of King of the Hill fame's favorite "attack" catchphrase, which is so ridiculous as to forever change anyone's (including this reviewer's) perception of the sound.

But all that being said, there is a kernel of story here, which had it been allowed to grow more naturally, would have made a wonderfully scary text. In a very brief prologue, Nicholson introduces the alien organism, which has landed on an Appalachian mountainside seemingly by accident. It is of course starving and more than ready to feed. Nicholson then shows us brief glimpses into the lives of some two dozen characters, hinting about their pasts. These characters include a self-righteous preacher who secretly lusts after his assistant, a moonshiner, an evil land developer, a burnt out multi-millionaire who has decided that the mountains hold the answer he has looked for all his life, a whorish trailer park wife who is ready to turn whore officially, her white trash boyfriend who is more than willing to pimp, a psychology professor, her radio DJ husband, an ex-librarian who has temporarily retired to take care of an ailing aunt, and various and sundry other Appalachian stereotypes. The vast majority of these characters serve no other purpose than to be converted into slow moving plant zombies. Despite the snail's pace with which these creatures move, they manage to catch their neighbors, and give them the French kiss of death (images of Tobe Hooper's Lifeforce may come to mind). Eventually, Leon, a local named Chester, and the librarian figure out that they're not in Kansas anymore, and start out to find the creature's lair in order to destroy it.

However, in what seems like an attempt to write like King (at least the lesser King novels) and Koontz, Nicholson only manages to be as predictable as they often can be. Granted, there is good fun in the local color descriptions, in the characters' North Carolina accents and idioms, and in the imagery of drunk moonshiners and alcoholics being subject to various types of alien probes. Heck, there's even fun in some of the more soap opera oriented subplots that inform this tale of plants gone wild, racism, communal secrets, and lies. But overall The Harvest is incredibly boring because it lacks emotional complexity. If I had wanted nothing but a plot line, with no character introspection and no challenges to my worldview, I would have picked up a lesser author.

Still, being I have read Nicholson in the past and have found him to be a masterful storyteller, I will pick up his next contribution to the genre. And I still have hope that The Harvest was only a pit stop in formulaic horror, and that Nicholson will be back on track with his next.