That can help with the old-fashioned feel of the community, but it also slows the book to an absolute crawl for so much of its length, making it feel at times like we’re watching the corn growing in real time. For one, Tryon’s prose is still overwrought and deeply dated-feeling. Harvest Home is a slow, slow, slow burn, and while the book eventually steps on the gas towards the end, I had a lot of the same issues with it that I did with The Other.

Are we looking at a full on Wicker Man situation here? Well, it certainly doesn’t seem out of line, no matter how kind and wonderful the town members can be, especially the Widow Fortune, who seems to more or less run the town.

And, as you’d imagine, those old ways have some creeping unease associated with them, from the passing references to a scorned young woman who disappeared to the disturbing way that the community chooses its ceremonial Harvest Lord. Harvest Home is a fine enough piece of folk horror, following a family fleeing life in the city for life in rural New England, where the corn crop is everything and the “old ways” still prevail. And so I thought it was worth checking out Tryon’s follow-up, the folk horror novel Harvest Home, which has a cult following all its own, to see if The Other was a fluke or just the first part of something more. Still, Tryon’s success is fascinating, and there’s something to be said for any author who can be said to have ushered in a new wave of horror (Grady Hendrix argued in his fantastic Paperbacks from Hell that The Other, along with Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist, are the holy trinity of late 60s/early 70s horror novels). Thomas Tryon is most well-known for his blockbuster horror bestseller The Other, a book whose story I liked a lot but whose overwrought prose often held it back for my taste.

Harvest Home by Thomas Tryon