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The Farm
By Scott Nicholson
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The Farm was first
published in 2006. It is the story of a woman and her young daughter,
who move to the country for a fresh start, but only find fresh problems.
With
one failed marriage behind her, Katy Logan remarries and hopes
to provide her daughter, Jett, with a more stable environment. So she
gives
up her job in Charlotte and moves to the small town of Solom,
in the
Blue Ridge Mountains. Her new husband, Gordon, is a college
lecturer; he owns a farm there and on that farm he has some goats. And
a
scarecrow—let's not forget the scarecrow because that thing is creepy.
Even when it stays put, and doesn't start moving around, it is
still one creepy, old, straw-filled dude.
From the very first word, of the very first chapter, as a reader, you
know that something is wrong. That first word is lilacs and Katy knows
for a fact that the smell of lilacs has no business being in her
kitchen. It's not just the smell though, lots of strange
things happen in the kitchen: jars fall from the shelves and a voice
calls Katy's name from the pantry.
Jett is having difficulty settling into her new home as well. She
misses her friends, she hates Gordon and his goats in equal measures,
and she has no idea at all where the best place is to score some pot.
Jett has promised Katy that she will never touch drugs again, but that
promise is getting harder and harder for her to keep. Especially now
that she is being stalked by a strange figure in a black hat,
who turns up at the most unexpected places and even seems to
have the
ability to walk through solid objects.
Another thing that worries Jett is the strange change that has come
over her mother since the move to Solom. Katy was never really much of
a cook, but now she is obsessed with cooking and spends more
and more time in the kitchen using recipes that belonged to Gordon's
first wife, Rebecca, who, by all accounts, died in rather mysterious
circumstances.
The new passion for cooking is not the only change that Jett has
noticed in her mother. Katy often seems distant and at one point
doesn't even know who Jett is talking about when she quotes a line from
a Tommy Keene song. Yet Katy is a Keene fan and the line that Jett used
was from one of her mother's own CDs. Very strange. And as the pages
turn things get stranger still. Scarier too, and all is not well in
Solom.
I have always liked haunted house stories and The Farm is a very
good
haunted house story. But there is an awful lot more going on in the
book than just a haunted, old farm house. There is for instance the
story of The Circuit Rider—a long dead preacher, who still visits
Sodom from time to time. He spends part of that time looking for his
horse, the rest of the time he busies himself with . . . more serious
matters.
Goats
are very important to the story too, and do you know what? After
reading The Farm
I don't think that I will ever see a goat in quite the
same light again. I have never been scared of goats. I mean, who's
scared of goats? Well, if anything is ever going to turn that around
it's The Farm
because Scott Nicholson makes goats sound very scary indeed. He
also keeps the action coming all the way through the book and the
closer I got to the end of it, the harder I found it to put it down. I
just needed to know what was going to happen next, if it would all turn
out okay in the end, and whether or not the goats would eat any of the
main characters.
~
List of Scott Nicholson books reviewed on this site ~
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