Come, Ye Thankful People Come!

 Before we get into this, I want to point out once again that the cover art on this novel from 1973 looks like an advertisement for Three's Company that didn't debut until 1978

 

 With a longer haired Joyce DeWitt and a dowdy Mrs. Roper.

 So, yeah. Harvest Home by Thomas Tryon. I read his Night of the Moonbow back in maybe '89-'90 somewhere, but hadn't really read any of his other books. As I was cleaning out a box of books looking for October horror offerings, I found this one and decided to give it a go. 

So, we open with Ned and Beth Constantine and their daughter Kate waking up for the Agnes Fair, roughly Midsummer, in Cornwall Coombe, somewhere in New England, (Tryon doesn't really specify a state, just mentions it's within a day's drive of New York City. I personally would put it maybe Western Massachusetts/Connecticut  border.) Recent transplants, they're city folks looking to go back to the land. Kate has psychosomatic asthma, Ned thinks he's sterile from a case of mumps he got from the chili proprietor, and Beth suffers from depression. We start off fairly innocent, although there are hints things are amiss in Cornwall Coombe. We meet Justin Hooke, the local Harvest King, who's entering his 7th year in the role. His wife Sarah is currently serving as the Corn Maiden. The young fellow chosen to take over for Justin as his term ends, Worthy Pettinger, is unhappy to be tapped, feeling trapped by The Old Ways that predominate attitudes in the village. (Indeed, he takes flack for using a tractor to plow instead of a horse and plow.) We also have the village tramp/post mistress, Tamar Penrose, and her 13 year old daughter/town seer Missy, who's freckles are constellations. And of course, the Widow Fortune, who's very much involved in everyone's life in the Coombe. 

 Without going into major spoiler territory, let's just say the Old Ways go back a bit further than Ned thought they did, and really, by the end of this, there isn't a single character who is anything resembling a good person. This includes, Ned, our narrator, who does something rather unforgivable not long before the Kindling Night and Harvest Home festivities. (Admittedly, I think most of us would rank murder above rape on a hierarchy of sins, but it's still a goddamn sin and really kind of knocks him off the moral high ground.) 

Anyway, when I started reading this, I was getting The Lottery by Shirley Jackson vibes, along with touches of HP Lovecraft in the whole insular town hiding things behind closed doors. I also read that this was part of the inspiration for King's "Children of the Corn", which I can also see bits of, and Gaimen's Hinzelmann from American Gods is very much spiritual kin to Widow Fortune. We could also add in bits of Christopher Lee in The Wicker Man, except the victims here are generally aware of what's happening and why, unlike the constable there. I'm also debating if having the women being the bad guys to an unsuspecting man is better or worse than Rosemary's Baby or The Stepford Wives where the menfolk were conspiring behind the women's back. 

Honestly, there's enough horror fiction in a similar vein as well as a bunch of neopagan information that some of the more SHOCKING events in here will likely not surprise a modern reader, there are enough other surprises within to keep you entertained until the Harvest Lord and the Corn Maiden make the corn at the end.