Harvest Home: A Novel

Thomas Tryon

Sep 2013 · Open Road Media

About this ebook

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.
   

Ratings and reviews

This book was a delightful surprise, having chose it solely on its good reviews. I picked it up and couldn't put it down again. Harvest Home is set in the close knit farming village of Cornwall Coombe, a village that holds tight to tradition and the ways of old. When Ned, his Wife and Daughter, find their new home in the village, they are welcomed into the community and embraced by it's residents. But Cornwall Coombe holds secrets, secrets that are carefully protected from outsiders. When Ned's curiosity begins to get the better off him, he runs afoul of the local wise woman, The Widow Fortune. It is then he begins to comprehend the darker side of the 'Old Ways', and the lengths the Widow will go to to protect the village traditions. As a Pagan myself, reading about the old traditions of a community that relies entirely on the abundance of the harvest, really drew me in. In the modern day, these traditions are still upheld by many, albeit symbolically. So, I enjoyed reading about my own traditions and beliefs played out in real life. Maybe I am a bit biased, but by the end, I had firmly sided with the Widow, and the women of the Coombe. My thoughts were that the men,

Gripping story: begins with a mild introduction of the characters and their lives, proceeds with a subtle unfolding of a theme and reaches a crescendo of terrifying but satisfying proportions. Brought out the pagan in me.

I have 2 coppies of this book and the movie with Betty Davis is great. Love it

About the author

DIVDIVThomas Tryon (1926–1991), actor turned author, made his bestselling debut with The Other (1971), which spent nearly six months on the New York Times bestseller list and allowed him to quit acting for good; a film adaptation, with a screenplay by Tryon and directed by Robert Mulligan, appeared in 1972. Tryon wrote two more novels set in the fictional Pequot Landing of The Other—Harvest Home (1973) and Lady (1974). Crowned Heads (1976) detailed the lives of four fictional film stars and All That Glitters (1986) explored the dark side of the golden age of Hollywood. Night Magic (published posthumously in 1995) was a modern-day retelling of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.   /div/div