It's the Season of the Witch, the month of Halloween, and I was in the mood for some seasonal fiction. Rather than try something new, I opted for something I knew already, or thought I knew, Thomas Tryon's Harvest Home.
It turned out less than I hoped, specifically in the story and scares departments, but impressed me nevertheless as the work of a solid literary craftsman.
Ned Constantine was a successful commercial illustrator in Manhattan. But he had problems, specifically a troubled marriage and an asthmatic daughter, and opted for a change of environment. Taking a drive deep into Connecticut, the family discovers the quaint village of Cornwell Coombe. There they come to an empty house, and the Constantines feel at once that they belong there. The owner of the house seems to agree. So does the rest of Cornwell Coombe. After making a sweet deal, Ned settles into painting the countryside. Newly-content wife Beth joins a sewing circle and befriends an old woman known as the Widow Fortune. Daughter Kate rides horses and seems cured of her asthma. It's all too good to be true, so of course it isn't.
"...in Cornwall Coombe, there's a code of ethics not to be tampered with," Ned is warned late in the book, too late as it turns out. "To go against one is to go against all. It's not really a village, you know. It's more a clan, a tribe."
Some clan. Remember that famous Nathaniel Hawthorne short story, maybe you read it back in high school, "Young Goodman Brown"? It's about a young New England Puritan who finds himself enjoying an upright and happy life in Salem Village, with a beautiful young wife and friendly neighbors. Alas, all is not what he thinks it is, as he discovers when wandering into a dark, nearby wood...
Harvest Home is exactly that, transported to what was then modern-day Connecticut with 20th-century sensibilities seemingly in place, but in reality just as ready to fall by the wayside as the Calvinistic sensibilities of Goodman Brown's neighbors.
The people of Cornwall Coombe prove deeply wedded to the ways of their past, ways that reach farther back than Thomas Hooker and subduing the Pequots. Early in the novel, Ned notes that "sense of veneration for that which had gone before," As it turns out, that's about the only thing about Cornwall Coombe he gets right.
It's really hard to write about the pluses and minuses of this, not Tryon's most famous work (that would be his debut novel, The Other) but perhaps a deeper favorite with horror aficionados, without venturing into spoiler country. Like The Other, the novel works as a kind of spring-loaded trap. At first, it's almost too quiet and pastoral to stir one's blood. Ned discovers a grave, conspicuously removed from the village cemetery, whose occupant, Grace Everdeen, appears to have had a troubled history. There's a family of nasty bootleggers, the Soakes, apparently involved in an ugly dispute with the villagers over some nearby woods called Soakes' Lonesome. Ned becomes curious about the Lonesome, and what secrets it may hold.
This should be dull reading, but Tryon's effective scene-setting, his ability to draw you into Ned's point-of-view as he experiences the oddities of the community around him, is quite marvelous. He comes to realize Cornwell Coombe has its secrets, and begins to wonder about the motives of those around him. Slowly, his perspective becomes less settled, less comfortable.
It's here Tryon activates his spring, and the book begins to lose me. I should caveat this by saying that the first time I read Harvest Home, I wasn't disappointed. I was swept along by Ned's experience, alternately intrigued and surprised by the various devices Tryon employs, like a ghostly mating dance and a sudden family emergency. But this time around, I wasn't so enthralled.
It comes down to my dissatisfaction with Ned, a guy who you are supposed to identify with until you realize he's too much of an idiot. The more things go wrong, the more he either sleepwalks though his daily rounds or does horrifically stupid things. Of course, Tryon can't let him do the really smart thing and leave the town; that's in violation of the horror-story code. But I kept wondering why he was so dense.
Perhaps Tryon was employing the same device here he did in The Other, that of the unreliable narrator. If so, it's to murkier effect; we never really see Ned as the central problem here, or at least I didn't. The other characters are mostly ciphers, with quaint New Englandy names and various peculiarities that seem their only distinguishing features. Most problematic are Beth and Kate; if you read the novel you may understand what I mean when I say they aren't depicted with near-enough care to account for their character arcs.
Ned Constantine was a successful commercial illustrator in Manhattan. But he had problems, specifically a troubled marriage and an asthmatic daughter, and opted for a change of environment. Taking a drive deep into Connecticut, the family discovers the quaint village of Cornwell Coombe. There they come to an empty house, and the Constantines feel at once that they belong there. The owner of the house seems to agree. So does the rest of Cornwell Coombe. After making a sweet deal, Ned settles into painting the countryside. Newly-content wife Beth joins a sewing circle and befriends an old woman known as the Widow Fortune. Daughter Kate rides horses and seems cured of her asthma. It's all too good to be true, so of course it isn't.
"...in Cornwall Coombe, there's a code of ethics not to be tampered with," Ned is warned late in the book, too late as it turns out. "To go against one is to go against all. It's not really a village, you know. It's more a clan, a tribe."
Some clan. Remember that famous Nathaniel Hawthorne short story, maybe you read it back in high school, "Young Goodman Brown"? It's about a young New England Puritan who finds himself enjoying an upright and happy life in Salem Village, with a beautiful young wife and friendly neighbors. Alas, all is not what he thinks it is, as he discovers when wandering into a dark, nearby wood...
Harvest Home is exactly that, transported to what was then modern-day Connecticut with 20th-century sensibilities seemingly in place, but in reality just as ready to fall by the wayside as the Calvinistic sensibilities of Goodman Brown's neighbors.
The people of Cornwall Coombe prove deeply wedded to the ways of their past, ways that reach farther back than Thomas Hooker and subduing the Pequots. Early in the novel, Ned notes that "sense of veneration for that which had gone before," As it turns out, that's about the only thing about Cornwall Coombe he gets right.
It's really hard to write about the pluses and minuses of this, not Tryon's most famous work (that would be his debut novel, The Other) but perhaps a deeper favorite with horror aficionados, without venturing into spoiler country. Like The Other, the novel works as a kind of spring-loaded trap. At first, it's almost too quiet and pastoral to stir one's blood. Ned discovers a grave, conspicuously removed from the village cemetery, whose occupant, Grace Everdeen, appears to have had a troubled history. There's a family of nasty bootleggers, the Soakes, apparently involved in an ugly dispute with the villagers over some nearby woods called Soakes' Lonesome. Ned becomes curious about the Lonesome, and what secrets it may hold.
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| A first-edition cover of Harvest Home. Being Tryon's second book, the book jacket makes sure to plug his successful debut, The Other, and point out this is another excursion into horror. Image from https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/816085.Harvest_Home |
This should be dull reading, but Tryon's effective scene-setting, his ability to draw you into Ned's point-of-view as he experiences the oddities of the community around him, is quite marvelous. He comes to realize Cornwell Coombe has its secrets, and begins to wonder about the motives of those around him. Slowly, his perspective becomes less settled, less comfortable.
It's here Tryon activates his spring, and the book begins to lose me. I should caveat this by saying that the first time I read Harvest Home, I wasn't disappointed. I was swept along by Ned's experience, alternately intrigued and surprised by the various devices Tryon employs, like a ghostly mating dance and a sudden family emergency. But this time around, I wasn't so enthralled.
It comes down to my dissatisfaction with Ned, a guy who you are supposed to identify with until you realize he's too much of an idiot. The more things go wrong, the more he either sleepwalks though his daily rounds or does horrifically stupid things. Of course, Tryon can't let him do the really smart thing and leave the town; that's in violation of the horror-story code. But I kept wondering why he was so dense.
Perhaps Tryon was employing the same device here he did in The Other, that of the unreliable narrator. If so, it's to murkier effect; we never really see Ned as the central problem here, or at least I didn't. The other characters are mostly ciphers, with quaint New Englandy names and various peculiarities that seem their only distinguishing features. Most problematic are Beth and Kate; if you read the novel you may understand what I mean when I say they aren't depicted with near-enough care to account for their character arcs.
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| Bette Davis plays Widow Fortune in a 1978 television adaptation, "The Dark Secret Of Harvest Home;" Rosanna Arquette plays Kate the teenager. A few years later, the two women inspired the titles of consecutive Grammy winners for Record of the Year, "Bette Davis Eyes" and "Rosanna." Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Secret_of_Harvest_Home |
The one character who sticks out in a good way in Harvest Home is the Widow Fortune, who becomes something of an ambassador to Cornwell Coombe for Ned and his family. Tryon draws out this character wonderfully; even if Cornwell Coombe never manages to surprise you the Widow Fortune very well may. With her dangling pair of pruning shears and sad reflections on her long-departed husband, Widow F offers the closest this novel comes to black humor, beyond the central concept itself about which "no man may know nor woman tell."
Harvest Home has its share of powerful scenes, including a couple of fairly graphic sex scenes for its time and some serious mutilation. It certainly packs a punch, which some horror fans will enjoy more than I did. I found myself let down by the same ending others seem to enjoy, wondering if something better could have been made of this fine material. But it was a fun ride most of the way for me.
Harvest Home has its share of powerful scenes, including a couple of fairly graphic sex scenes for its time and some serious mutilation. It certainly packs a punch, which some horror fans will enjoy more than I did. I found myself let down by the same ending others seem to enjoy, wondering if something better could have been made of this fine material. But it was a fun ride most of the way for me.
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