Thomas Tryon

Ned Constantine and his family abandon hectic New York for a tranquil New England village where they unknowingly become part of the secret Harvest Home ritual

Harvest Home

Stretching definitions of “contemporary” with a 1973 first edition, but it’s close enough.  The Constantine family begins a new life in idyllic Cornwall Coombe (CT), a small village still defined by the vestiges of ancient traditions, particularly those pertaining to the heir cultivation of corn.  The ends justify the means in Cornwall Coombe, leaving a number of mysterious and troubling concerns for certain newcomers. Questions arising from a need to understand mysteries of the past are complicated enough to rely on the full length of the novel for answers, and the process of seeking them is fraught with new horrors, new questions.  Meanwhile, one may find that family members assimilate with ease, becoming… the enemy? No. Sources of truth? Maybe. Different people, entirely? Almost certainly, and that is naturally terrifying. Behind the veil of normalcy, there is only horror.  Horror that originates with authors like Shirley Jackson, is elaborated by Tryon, and picked up by Stephen King and David Lynch, who show that it can- and almost certainly will- be found everywhere, in every town, village, and suburb, on the other side of every closed door.  Harvest Home felt fresh, well-crafted, enjoyable even in fear- and it did, truly, frighten me, the last pages stuck as though I tried to rip them out and eat them, they simply wouldn’t resolve or sublimate.  To me, this beats Tryon’s more popular “The Other,” hands down.  A phenomenal read, even when it’s punching you in the face.  

Theodore Kaplan

A family flees the crime-ridden city—and finds something worse—in “a brilliantly imagined horror story” by the New York Times–bestselling author (The Boston Globe). 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.

Harvest Home

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