At the crumbling Hemlock Institute of Agrarian Arts tucked in the Vermont hills, Mara Ellison, a solitary research assistant cataloging folklore about blight, becomes the subject of whispers and rotten jokes. The other graduate cohorts move in glossy clusters she cannot pierce, until a quartet of eerie, honey-voiced legacy students called the Gleaners invite her to a midnight seminar beyond the cornfield and the rusted grain silos. Wren with her opal ring, Cass with dirt under perfect nails, Lionel who laughs like a barn door swinging, and June whose perfume smells faintly of apples and rain, lead Mara to an abandoned granary known as the Throat. There, under a bell that never rings, they teach her a secret syllabus of harvest rites in which straw, moths, and a quiet cut of blood are bound with words. Their workshop births scarelings and shadow-things that know the seams of the world better than any professor, and what crawls out of the husks arrives with consequences as wondrous as they are predatory.
When Harvest of Shadows opens, Mara has become a reluctant campus celebrity after a sensational paper and a podcast interview drew attention to the institute's strange past. On an autumn book-fair circuit stop in Cold Water, Massachusetts, she is seized at dusk by her former friends, furious at the way they were rendered as monsters. Gagged with burlap and tied with corn-silk rope in the bed of a wagon painted with saints, she is wheeled past the ferris wheel and kettle-corn booths into the old apple barn. One by one, the Gleaners take the crescent sickle and insist on their turn to speak, telling of the first time they met in the herbarium, the pact they made on the cracked steps of St. Abel's, and the long night they conjured their inaugural shadow harvest from a thunderhead and a dowser's wand. Names of towns lost to drought, an orchard that keeps its own calendar, a scarecrow with a human voice, and the black-lit corridors of the campus stacks crowd their testimony until past and present braid like twine.
With a captive Mara as our unwilling witness, we are drawn into a visceral folk-academia nightmare where creation pulls at the rootwork of love and hunger, and where the line between scholarship and sorcery is sliced thin as a corn blade. It is a blood-bright fairy-tale slasher lit by lanterns and field fires, a confession that is also a curse and a cure. At once an origin and an aftermath and yet entirely its own tale, Harvest of Shadows asks what is owed to what we make, and what we must let rot to live. Open your granaries, Gleaner, to a feverish, darkly funny, and relentlessly uncanny revel that will leave chaff in your hair and a whisper in your ear.
