gilda_elise (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
gilda_elise) wrote2021-08-20 08:29 am
gilda_elise) wrote2021-08-20 08:29 am
Harvest Home by Thomas Tryon
After watching his asthmatic daughter suffer in the foul city air, Theodore Constantine decides to get back to the land. When he and his wife search New England for the perfect nineteenth-century home, they find no township more charming, no countryside more idyllic than the farming village of Cornwall Coombe. Here they begin a new life: simple, pure, close to nature—and ultimately more terrifying than Manhattan’s darkest alley.
When the Constantines win the friendship of the town matriarch, the mysterious Widow Fortune, they are invited to join the ancient festival of Harvest Home, a ceremony whose quaintness disguises dark intentions. In this bucolic hamlet, where bootleggers work by moonlight and all of the villagers seem to share the same last name, the past is more present than outsiders can fathom—and something far more sinister than the annual harvest is about to rise out of the earth.
Credited as the inspiration for Stephen King’s Children of the Corn, Thomas Tryon’s chilling novel was ahead of its time when first published, and continues to provoke abject terror in readers.
I read this years ago, when it was first published. I remember really liking it; I did this time, too. The book is written in first person, which I usually don’t like, but it works here. The story is told from the point of view of Ted Constantine, who has left his job as an advertising executive to take up his old passion, painting.
At first, Ted and his family love their new home, but at time goes by, Ted finds himself on the outside looking in. The village takes on a frightening aspect. Secrets are everywhere, and those who know those secrets can be anyone, so no one can be trusted.
Which brings me to the only flaw I found in this book. Ted is a moron. He does things that had me practically shouting, “What are you doing? Are you an idiot?” Which, it turns out, he is. Just as the characters in so many slasher movies do things that just about anyone else wouldn’t, so does Ted as he moves toward his fate.
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*Written by a woman - The Mummy (Ramses the Damned #1) by Anne Rice
*Written by a best-selling horror author:
1. If It Bleeds by Stephen King
2. The Shining
*Written by an indie author - Echoes of Home by M.L. Rayner
*Historical horror (must be an historical novel written by a contemporary author) - Last Train From Perdition by Robert McCammon
*Folk horror - Harvest Home by Thomas Tryon
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