Harvest Home

Harvest Home is a horror story focused on a city family who becomes country dwellers, trying to buy their way into a peaceful life.

The narrator is Ned, the father, and husband who gives up his advertising job and brings his wife and daughter to the farm town of Cornwall Coombe. Their new home appears to answer all their prayers, even offering a homeopathic cure for his teenage daughter Kate. The naturally curious and energetic Ned starts digging too closely into the secrets and customs of their apparently friendly but odd new neighbors.

The scary bits rely on fear of religion or eldritch “ancient' religious practices of the villagers. They feel that what they are doing is right and justified but are savvy enough to realize that “outsiders” wouldn't get it.

There's something a bit Lovecraftian about this, worship of ancient deities, human sacrifices, and brutal punishment against those who break the rules. Things that play on the fears of modern, “rational” people. The difference is instead of fearing immigrants and other races like Lovecraft, Tryon is going for men's fear of women and their “power.” In Harvest Home, female power means witch-like and “closer to nature” and other stereotypes like these.

I don't know how this was taken in the 70s when Tryon wrote it, but some of the female characterizations, the rituals and corn tradtions seemed a little silly to me in 2023. My inability to take some things seriously didn't keep me from enjoying the ride and still finding lot of it unsettling (in the good way a great horror book should be unsettle you).

Ned is a sympathetic narrator, whom I felt bad for as he got so deeply over his head.

That ending was, wow, very cynical and dark.

Overall the story has a slow build-up with a powerful payoff for readers with patience. Harvest Home was one of the books featured in Paperbacks from Hell. I've had a lot of fun looking into these old classics with the guidance of that book.

Harvest Home is compelling folk horror exploring what happens when a city family moves into a small country town. This work was written in the 70s and depictions of women and “traditional values” are not well aligned with contemporary views of gender, sexuality, and social values. The protagonist can be fairly described as sexist, and this may alienate readers. The book also contains depictions of sexual violence which are disturbing and perhaps never really fully dealt with in the narrative. Despite this, I found the world building in Harvest Home to be fascinating and many sections of the book to be creepy. Although there were some issues with the book, the prose and plot kept me engaged and invested in what was coming next. I also found the ending to be fairly satisfying. Overall I would recommend Harvest Home, simply with the caveat that one may find aspects of the story disturbing and distasteful.

The old New England village of Cornwall Coombe appears to outsiders like Ned, his wife Beth and their daughter Kate as a throwback to simpler times. The first time the family sees the village across a quaint covered bridge the sun is shining upon it out of dark rain clouds with a rainbow as a backdrop. Beth says it reminds her of a Currier & Ives print. When the family is allowed to purchase and upgrade a 300 year old house in the village, Ned, the narrator of the tale, and his family think they have truly found the country life many city folk can only dream about. But with the work on the house complete in the Fall of the year and corn fields soon to be harvested, Ned, who is now a full time artistic painter, slowly finds his dream turning into a nightmare as he investigates the dark underpinnings of the village. While the people of the village appear to accept and befriend Ned and his family, as the Fall progresses through it's marked main events of Agnes Fair, The Days of the Season, Tithing Day, The Corn Play and heading toward final Harvest Home, Ned is subtly being corrupted and his family drawn away into the true matriarchal pagan ritualism of the village. Real horror awaits Ned during Cornwall Coombe's Harvest Home.