Ned Constantine, his wife Beth, and their daughter Kate relocate from New York City to an isolated Connecticut village, Cornwall Coombe, where the villagers adhere to "the old ways", eschewing modern agricultural methods and having limited contact with the outside world. The villagers celebrate a number of festivals that revolve around the cultivation of corn. The most important festival is "Harvest Home", which takes place once every seven years. Ned befriends Robert Dodd, a former college professor who is now blind and housebound; like Ned, Robert was once an outsider who moved to Cornwall Coombe at the behest of his wife Maggie, who was born in the village. Ned also meets Justin Hooke, who serves as the current ceremonial "Harvest Lord"; Justin's wife Sophie, his chosen "Corn Maiden" in the approaching "Corn Play"; and Worthy Pettinger, a young man whose dream of going to agricultural college are frustrated by his parents, who hold to the old ways. The most important person in the village is the widow Mary Fortune, known as "Widow," the village herbalist and midwife. When Kate suffers a severe asthma attack, the Widow Fortune performs a tracheotomy to save her life, and later prescribes home remedies which cure Kate entirely. Beth and Kate grow to adore the Widow, but Ned is suspicious of her herbal medicines and finds her influence in the town troubling. Meanwhile, Worthy is chosen as the next "Harvest Lord" who will replace Justin at the end of his seven years of service. Worthy does not wish to become the Harvest Lord, confusing Ned, who understood the title to be an honor. At church, Worthy shouts out a curse upon the corn before fleeing. The Widow announces that Worthy is henceforth "bane" and will be shunned from the village if he ever returns. Ned, however, secretly provides Worthy with money to escape the village, and Worthy promises to write to him. Ned begins to understand that the villagers, led by their women, practice pagan fertility rites to ensure their harvests. He became suspicious of the upcoming Harvest Home, but the most anyone will tell him is that it is "what no man may see nor woman tell." Meanwhile, unknown to Ned, Worthy's letter to Ned is intercepted and used to send a posse to retrieve him. Ned is horrified to see Worthy's body burned in a massive bonfire on Kindling Night. On the day of Harvest Home, Justin's wife Sophie commits suicide. She is denied burial in consecrated ground on the orders of the Widow Fortune. Ned denounces her for this cruelty, and the Widow declares Ned an outcast and has him imprisoned in the village jail to keep him from interfering with Harvest Home. All the women then depart to choose another Corn Maiden. Ned escapes and returns home to find his car missing and his phone dead. Ned goes to Robert for help, only to be told that on the night of Harvest Home, all the phones are disabled and all the cars confiscated until morning, while all the men are confined to their homes. Robert reveals that he himself was blinded for attempting to discover the secret of Harvest Home and begs Ned not to go out again. Fearing for his wife and daughter, Ned ignores Robert and returns to the village. Ned arrives in time to see the heavily-veiled new Corn Maiden, Justin, and the village women depart for Harvest Home. Ned races ahead of them. The Corn Maiden removes her veil, revealing herself to be Beth. When Ned cries out in horror, the women capture him and are on the verge of killing him before they are stopped by Widow Fortune. The Widow explains that Ned's family was allowed to move to Cornwall Coombe because they needed new blood. She then forces him to watch as Beth has sex with Justin, symbolically uniting the Harvest Lord and the Corn Maiden to ensure a good harvest. At the moment of Justin's climax, Tamar Penrose cuts his throat with a sickle. The women then sprinkle his blood through the fields. Ned tries to escape but the women surround him, blind him, and cut out his tongue. Months later, the blind, mute Ned learns that Beth is pregnant and that Kate is to be the next Corn Maiden.
Reception
In a 1973 book review by Kirkus Reviews called the book "not only tethered to considerable earlier Americana but sometimes garroted by it—there's too much corn to husk before the last loaded third of the book." Writing in 1976 for The New York Times, Stephen King wrote, "It isn’t a great book, not a great horror novel, not even a great suspense novel... Never mind the best seller list. Mind this, instead: Sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, it is a true book; it is an honest book in the sense that it says exactly what Tryon wanted to say. And if what he wanted to say wasn’t exactly Miltonian, it does have this going for it: in forty years, when most of us are underground, there will still be a routine rebinding once a year for the library copies of Harvest Home".
