Norman Partridge

Tom Piccirilli interviewed Norman Partridge about his latest book, Dark Harvest.

One exchange from their dialogue:

PIC: So much of your fiction deals with western and crime motifs -- desert dusty towns, ex-cons and bad boys drifting into deeper troubles with .45s blazing. How was it switching gears and writing a Middle American cornfield setting full of traditional Halloween elements in Dark Harvest?

PART: Well, I kept the .45s and bad boys, pard. As far as the town goes, I wanted it to reflect my memories of the sixties, what it was like to grow up in a town with a little bit of the varnish rubbed off. Maybe a tougher place, but still a place that had holidays like everywhere else, where once a year you picked out a pumpkin and carved a face on that sucker that'd scare the neighbor's cat. But the setting also came from fiction. If you're a writer who loves this kind of stuff, you've put a lot of Halloween through your creative filter. And, for me, that's a particular reality that works just fine when it comes to getting a story down on the page. I was watching a lot of first and second season Twilight Zone while I wrote Dark Harvest. Many of those episodes are about perfect little towns with a secret. I even managed to give Rod Serling a cameo along the way. That turned out to be one of my favorite scenes in the book.

Read the full interview.

The Page 99 Test: Dark Harvest.

--Marshal Zeringue