Dark Harvest

Recommended by Steven Schlozman, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School

This book is among the best American horror novels ever written. It mixes Americana with a sense of resigned but terrifying fatalism, adding just a tincture of the occult. Picture a small New England town, normal in all ways except one day a year when everyone knows that the harvest yields something foul. It combines normalcy and gore, letter jackets and morality, and most importantly, the illusion that you can escape when you never really can.