"A fascinating and truly inventive novella. This is an original and significant piece of work, not only in its novel, singular and successful approach to folk horror and 'imaginary' films but in the creation of its own self referencing folklore." Grey Malkin, Folk Horror Revival * * * The Corn Mother is an exploration of the world, stories and dreamscapes of an imaginary lost near-mythical film: 1878: A villager is forced to flee from their home after rumours begin that they have cursed the crops. Their vengeful spirit, known as the corn mother, is said to visit those responsible in the night, bringing ill fortune and an all-encompassing sense of guilt.
1982: A film called The Corn Mother begins to be made. Although the plot is fictional it closely resembles the story of the fleeing villager. The film is completed but never released, with all known copies disappearing after its production company collapses.
1984: A lifelong quest begins to find the near-mythical film.
2020: All mentions of The Corn Mother begin to disappear from the world, calling into question if the film ever existed.
The book is a wandering amongst "the whispers that tumble forth from the corn mother's kingdom". A place and story where fact, fiction, reality and dreams blur into one.
* * *The Corn Mother's structure is inspired by the cycle of the year. Following the number of seasons, the book is split into four sections; it has 52 chapters (which could also be considered scenes or episodes), the same number as there are weeks in the year; relating to the number of days in a non-leap year, each chapter's text contains no more than 365 words.
The novella's release is accompanied by an an album also by Stephen Prince called The Corn Mother: Night Wraiths.
The Corn Mother is released as part of the A Year in the Country project, which is a set of year-long journeys though the undercurrents and flipsides of bucolic dreams; it is a wandering amongst subculture that draws from the further reaches of folk culture, the hidden and underlying tales of the land and where they meet and intertwine with the spectral histories of what has come to be known as hauntology. As a project, it has included a website featuring writing, artwork and music which stems from that otherly pastoral/spectral hauntological intertwining, alongside a growing catalogue of album and book releases.
* * *"A Year In The Country is steadily building up a body of work that presents an alternative view of rural Britain... the project's output is consistently fascinating." Psychogeographic Review
"A multimedia artist who's been building his own otherworldly visions of Arcadian England under the name A Year In The Country. Both an exploration of a pastoral past and a rumination on a dystopian present, his recordings marry spectral folk to an electronic otherworld, whilst he has written books of non-fiction that investigates the inner-psyche of our collective histories... The Corn Mother, his latest handsomely presented work marries his written and recorded sides... a ghostly collection that marries ambient noise, sparse instrumentation and murky electronics to a suitably unsettling effect. Eerie, elegant and ever so evocative." Thomas Patterson, Shindig! magazine, writing about The Corn Mother novella and The Corn Mother: Night Wraiths album
