“Beware the Food of the Fae”: A Review of The Girl in the Corn, by Jason Offutt

 

(Brentwood, TN: CamCat Publishing, camcatpublishing.com, 2022). ISBN: 9780744304510

Along with abandoned castles, caves, and ancient forests, cornfields are immediately evocative of horror. Images of a pair of gloved hands pulling someone unexpectedly into high corn (something I filmed last autumn for one of my projects), the rats in the corn in Stephen King’s The Stand, scarecrows, and of course King’s Children of the Corn all bring a chill to the spine. 

Then there are the entities known as faeries, which are not the cute little sprites that fill the pages of children’s books. Even Tinkerbell, before she was Disney-fied, kills Wendy in JM Barrie’s Peter Pan because she is jealous of her affection for Peter. Faery and UFO lore have significant overlaps (a fact touched on in this story) and the idea of parallel dimensions and the elements that make up a good faerie story—don’t eat the food, don’t invade their space, the exchanging of a human baby with a Changeling, be aware that days are years, etc.—are, at their core, pretty frightening.

Jason Offutt blends these two elements into a story that is part nightmare, part classic horror, and part commentary on family dynamics. Spanning 30 years, The Girl in the Corn centers on two boys, Thomas and Bobby, whose family lives and future prospects are each less than glamorous. Bobby’s mom is straight out of Pink Floyd’s “Mother,” and when the teenaged Bobby finally stood up to her, I really didn’t mind. Nor did I blame his father for having a thing with his secretary. You can blame them both, however, for dressing everything in religious trappings while being truly vile beings—especially when they ask Bobby about playing with Ouija boards and listening to Ozzy Osbourne.

I admit that, in 1986, I did both. Plus, in middle school, I play a lot of D and D, which was another target of the eighties Satanic Panic. And I turned out not to be a demented, demonic serial killer (although I do write about them quite a bit).

However, when Bobby reads a 2005 article about Pope Benedict saying that Satanic films are designed by Hollywood to bring the prince of darkness into people’s lives, that is a little harder to dismiss out of hand as the ravings of religious zealots, at least in part…

As a counterpoint, there is Thomas’s family. His father is struggling to keep the family farm going in the mid-eighties—remember Farm Aid and the rise of Monsanto and multinational conglomerate agriculture?—and his mother is just the right amount of doting without being saccharine. As six-year-old Thomas listens to his mother singing one of his favorite songs in the corn, he has an encounter with a frightening, otherworldly spirit that sets the next thirty years of his life on a trajectory of a stay in a mental hospital, injury, poverty, dreams unrealized, nightmares realized, and a plethora of supernatural experiences.

Bobby’s story begins at a campsite, where an all-too-human although still horrific encounter with a boy slightly older lands him in a mental ward (where he meets Thomas) and from there into a life of ceaseless darkness, violence, and vengeance.  

Both boys have girls come in and out of their lives who present as equal parts sexualized and manipulative. One of them, Jillian, they meet at the mental hospital. At times, I thought of Harold and Nadine from The Stand—more so for Bobby. For most of the thirty years of the story, the main characters in this book are passengers predestined to be in the same passenger car at the same time, pulled along a track of misery, minimum-wage jobs, and increasing violence by a mix of earthly and otherworldly forces.

Offutt’s research and attention to detail with the faeries is impressive, illuminating their most frightening and dangerous aspects, as is his ability to chill the blood of the reader. The violence, although pervasive and graphic, is appropriate and necessary to a narrative of Good and Evil, Light and Dark, with significant consequences such as this one. Established lore and firsthand accounts going back hundreds of years tell us the fae are able to go from beautifully alluring to abjectly evil in appearance and action in a heartbeat, and they certainly do so here. Like that moment in The Shining when Jack hugs the woman from the bathtub and we see what she really is—a bloated, decaying corpse (although the music cues what’s coming as she approaches)—we watch Thomas and Bobby engage with these monsters in very intimate ways, including eating their food… a major no-no if you know your faery lore.

If you don’t, it’s delivered in context as needed without slowing the pace or easing the tension—another mark of a talented writer. It’s further enhanced by what Rosemary Ellen Guiley, author of sixty-five books, TV personality, and lecturer, was working on at the end of her life (she died in 2019)—a paranormal Theory of Everything. I was fortunate to be mentored and published by Guiley over the course of a decade, and I am continuing her work. Like us, Offutt’s characters promote the theory that faeries, demons, elementals, and so on are all expressions of the same dark phenomena. Midway through the book, when Thomas experiences the faerie world, there is a grounding in Norse mythology that fans of high fantasy will find familiar. 

One of my favorite tropes in small town horror stories is the local sheriff. Offutt’s Sheriff Boyd Donally does not disappoint. He is my favorite character, and it is his beer-fueled, reluctant police work over the three decades that holds the larger story together. He is Thomas’s uncle, and he knows about these horrors—both from the past and as similar cases come across his desk through the years of the story—so when he hears about what is happening and personally witnesses something, his belief—which he at first keeps to himself—increasingly legitimizes the story. This is to Offutt’s credit—there is nothing worse than everyone saying, “It’s just your imagination” for the first half of a horror novel.

I always appreciate a good homage in a genre novel. There’s a plastic snake from a He-Man and the Masters of the Universe Skeletor figure that comes into play as a talisman that recalls the scale model plastic cross one of the child characters uses in King’s Salem’s Lot, which is in itself a deconstruction of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. I already mentioned The Stand. By the end, Bobby reminds me a little of Trashcan Man, without the blind, Yes Master servitude.

As dark entities from the faerie world increasingly use characters in this novel for nefarious ends, the idea of “an instrument of evil” becomes increasingly prevalent. A quick scroll through what’s currently popular on Netflix reveals that people are as fascinated with serial killers as ever. An aspect of this fascination is the question of demonic possession. As a paranormal investigator, author, and speaker, convicted killers sometimes contact me from prison claiming that a dark entity possessed them just prior to their crime. Although this might bring to mind the recent Ed and Lorraine Warren horror fantasy The Devil Made Me Do It, and possession is not an explicit component of The Girl in the Corn (reanimation of corpses, however, is), I have found enough credible evidence over the years to explain a small percentage of the serial killer phenomenon. There is certainly something haunting and demonic in Richard Ramirez’s eyes…

If you enjoy The Girl in the Corn, a tantalizing cliffhanger cues a possible sequel.

Who knows what further hell might await Thomas and Jillian if that comes to be?