There is a line which has resounded through B-films, soap-operas and pulp fiction and it goes something like this: "Ned, wait!… Are you familiar with what are commonly referred to as the Greek mysteries?" There is a pregnant pause, and Ned whispers, in a tone somewhere between shock, anguish and determination, "No! And that won't stop me!" My first quote is taken verbatim from Mr Tryon's new novel (he is already famous for The Other, the other one), but I must admit to writing the second quote myself. The Ned is Theodore Constantine and indeed he doesn't let it stop him; his abysmal ignorance of classical ritual accounts for most of the plot of Harvest Home, and he wouldn't know a vegetation symbol if one got up and tickled him…. Who is Widow Fortune, and why does she keep crying "Drat!" and "Where in the nation!"? Is there something which the villagers will not or cannot reveal? And why is everything so damned rural? Read on, Mr Tryon keeps hinting, and you may see something nasty.

And indeed, eventually, we do. At first there is only the occasional glimpse of darkness visible; the villagers mutter about something called the "Waste" and at one of their simple country fairs there are enough phallic symbols to make an academic blush. But Tryon writes very discreetly, and the first climax comes almost without warning….

The story in question has something to do with the Earth-Mother and the Eternal Return; English schoolboys of the more respectable kind have been studying this sort of thing for years, and it may be that familiarity breeds noblesse oblige. But, whatever his education, Mr Tryon is a shade portentous about these perfectly harmless pagan rites; he reacts to them as an American dame would react to Stonehenge, and his final Dionysian touches are too bloodstained to be interesting. I know that America is a matriarchal society but this, Mr Tryon, is ridiculous.

Harvest Home is a marketable concoction of sex, witchcraft and literary pretension, enormously long and unbelievably silly. It is the second, more ambitious and rather more distasteful novel of a Hollywood actor turned writer; its atmosphere resembles those inept horror films especially made for television and shown at furtive hours….

The Cold Comfort Farm names … are misleading: that isn't at all the flavour of the book. The lumbering efforts at thoughtful observation are a diversion, too…. Its real concern is with hysteria, cruelty, and adolescent fantasies of perverse sex. (p. 219)

The Times Literary Supplement (© Times Newspapers Ltd. (London) 1974; reproduced from The Times Literary Supplement by permission), March 1, 1974.