The first half of this book I loved. I loved the writing and how the Greek chorus as townspeople would come in and then the point of view would switch to a different character. How that all flowed was wonderful and I had so many feelings and I couldn't stop reading. At some point it changed and was not so fluid with different chapters from different characters. It was still good, but not as good as those first parts. I was not familiar with the Greek tragedies it was a retelling of so I didn't know where it was going. I did enjoy the read overall and look forward to reading more from this author.

3.5 stars rounded up to 4. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

While I’m not familiar with the story this book is a retelling of, I will say that this is probably one of the most unique books I’ve read in a while. I think the Midwestern Gothic atmosphere did a great job of building the tension as we reached the climax. The half formed thoughts, the mid sentence POV changes, the random bits of poetry, made the book feel both tension filled and overwhelming. It built into a crescendo that felt like a payoff after struggling with the complicated organization that began with the start of this book.

A Harvest of Furies brings fresh life to an ancient story in a layering of horror that rings with ominous gothic tones yet stays grounded with a natural infusion of a sort of folk horror. There are books I come across that are so creative and well-written I deeply wish I had a university class to discuss them in. This is one.

Casey’s prose is addictive with its embodied lucidity, slicing cleanly into emotion and burrowing under your skin before you’ve noticed. Their words create a world of loss and longing that is achingly familiar, spinning reality from myth.

The true star of this novel is the integration of the Greek chorus both in form and character. Sharp lines of poetry allow for natural breaks to sections, while leading a reader from one character to the next. It reminded me of immersive theatre in which the play itself guides the audience in the best way. The evolution of this form over time as well combined with other textual devices that play with format allow for a unique experience in reading. One that, at times, did feel a bit overwhelming, but added to the feelings of instability and tension.
There were a few weak aspects of this book for me. Major points of its inspiration, The Oresteia, were changed. This likely isn’t meant to be a one-to-one retelling, but the changes did not feel to add to the story other than to make it fit within the context, and sometimes even felt like they weakened the base of the original’s horror. Outside our main duo of Orrie and Emma, other characters within the family occasionally fell flat to me as a reader, especially toward the second half.

While there are references to several Greek myths, I found this to be more focused on the tradition of Greek tragedy and storytelling - an important distinction for any interested readers. I don’t necessarily think you need a grounding in The Oresteia or Greek theatre to like this book, but I do think readers expecting a Greek myth retelling might get something different from what they expected. Yet I’d encourage those people to still give this book a read, as it adds more dialogue to the ever evolving landscape of modern interpretations of Ancient Greek culture.

If you’re interested in cycles of trauma and vengeance delivered to you in an unsettling package, or in retellings and revitalizations of classical forms, this book is for you.

An unflinching look on how war can leave scars further than skin deep, the exploration of ancient tragedy throughout history and the horrors of family trauma seeping darkness into the future. A story where sordid secrets claw their way to the surface, a fragile semblance of normality is shattered and the rot from family secrets is finally exposed. Atmospheric and eerie.

𝐓𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐤 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐭𝐨 𝐋𝐚𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐧𝐟𝐢𝐬𝐡 𝐏𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐚 𝐝𝐢𝐠𝐢𝐭𝐚𝐥 𝐚𝐝𝐯𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞𝐝 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐫 𝐜𝐨𝐩𝐲 𝐯𝐢𝐚 𝐍𝐞𝐭𝐆𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐞𝐲 𝐨𝐟 𝐀 𝐇𝐚𝐫𝐯𝐞𝐬𝐭 𝐨𝐟 𝐅𝐮𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐬 𝐛𝐲 𝐇𝐚𝐲𝐝𝐞𝐧 𝐂𝐚𝐬𝐞𝐲

I just finished A Harvest of Furies, and I feel like I’ve been spun through a tornado of blood, secrets, and sorrow. From the very first chapter, Hayden Casey’s writing had me in a chokehold—lush, brutal, and steeped in the kind of mythic dread that creeps under your skin and stays there.

This isn’t just a horror novel. It’s a reckoning. The rural setting felt almost too alive, like the land itself was watching, waiting, judging. And the characters—especially the women—are raw and unforgettable. There’s so much rage in this book, but it’s not aimless; it’s earned, it’s generational, and it burns through every page with purpose.

What stood out most to me was the way grief, trauma, and legacy are tangled up in the violence. There’s a gothic undertone here—secrets buried in dirt, rot beneath beauty—but it’s also incredibly modern in its voice and themes. Think folk horror meets feminist fury, with just enough surrealism to keep you unsettled.

It’s not a comfort read. It’s jagged and unrelenting and full of teeth. But if you like your horror with depth, atmosphere, and an unapologetically angry heart, this is one you won't want to miss. I’ll be thinking about this one for a long, long time.

This novel takes the bones of Greek myth and gives them flesh made of rust, grief, and rural dust. It's not just about war—it’s about what war brings home, what it does to those waiting, and how cycles of violence can haunt a family like a ghost. The prose is sharp, poetic, and emotionally charged, with a creeping dread that builds toward an inevitable reckoning.

A bold and brutal exploration of inherited trauma, vengeance, and the curse of silence. Fans of Sharp Objects, Southern Gothic, or literary myth retellings will find themselves gripped—and maybe a little haunted.

3.5 🌟

This was one of the most unique books I think I've read in a long time. This Greek retelling exceeded my expectations and left me feeling like I was in a disorienting fever dream, floating from one character to the next as they struggle to adjust to their father coming home.

I really enjoyed the writing and structure of this book; the confusion and the stumbling through each POV change added to the story's growing fear and tension that I believe a normal narrative would have lacked in. I feel by using the odd snippets of poetry, the lines of town gossip, orrie's glimmering of the suncat her, and the section headers that feel like stage directions all add together to overwhelm the reader and leave us as lost and muddled as the characters themselves. And what a fun way to use the Greek chorus by inserting them as town gossip at the beginning; so clever and fitting for a book set in Midwest America. Also by using them as breaks between characters is so interesting as they feel like they are interrupting the thoughts of each POV. We have hanging punctuations and half formed thoughts like we just changed the chanel mid sentence. With such a an intimate look at each character's thoughts we get to really feel the hightened emotions as they escalate and escalate with each bit of tragedy that unfolds around them.

The first half of this book was definitely the best as it left me speechless with each part of the plot as it went along but at some point it took a small turn that wasn't as elevated as it began. That being said I still feel like I've had my emotions wrong out of me like a wet towel; it's going to take a while for me to recover from this reading and what it put me though. So I won't say anything of the plot as I want others to feel as emotionally wrecked as I was.

I did love this book in the end; it was well written and so unlike anything I've read before. I will absolutely read more from this author in the future. Thank you NetGalley and Lanternfish Press for lending me this ARC!

This wasn’t for me, but that doesn’t make it a bad book! If I were more into Greek mythology i think it would’ve hit different for me. I do think it was a fresh take, and I liked that the writing style was unique. This might be a case where I reread in a few years and I have a totally different opinion!

Hayden Casey manages to reinvent a Greek play with just enough Americana feeling for it to feel fresh, immersive and, most importantly, relevant.
The story, though not deeply complicated, proves to be difficult to express into words of review, for it entrails itself as such a complicated tapestry of secrets, rivalry, and sisterhood.
It is, however, not a book that one would expect to read in one sitting, or when one's mind is drifting towards nothing. A Harvest Of Furies demands your attention, but it also deeply rewards the reader for it. While it may be true that the sudden POV changes and quite erratic and sudden writing style might prove strenuous at the beginning, it manages to not overshadow the plot.
A brilliant book with deeply human characters, a portrait of the grief that knows not country.

I'm really sad to be giving this a low rating, but unfortunately i didn't manage to finish the book; each attempt left me with a headache worse than the previous one. I don't know if it was an issue with the e-book formatting, but it was really just a painful mess to read: sentences started half-way through, linked to passages that at first glance seemed to have nothing to do with the story altogether, making it extremely easy to get lost and not understand what was going on in the story.
Frankly I feel bad for the rating, since it was probably (hopefully) just a formatting error, but the half I've read was truly hard to get through, and I feel like that should still count in the final score.

Hands-down my favorite integration of Greek tragedy since Hadestown, and one of the most creative books I’ve read recently. With a masterfully and inventively integrated chorus—far and away the highlight—this is an exciting, artfully crafted work which stands out for its stunning prose and creative use of language. I do think that the narration is stronger than the narrative; while I wouldn’t consider familiarity with The Oresteia essential, and this stands on its own as an excellent Midwestern gothic without further context, I do think that the payoff will resonate best with those at least somewhat aware of the Atreus lore; while the favored fatal flaw of the tragedians is hubris, the heart of tragedy lies in the dramatic irony of foreknowledge (the chorus does still assist here for those not familiar in its time-honored role).

Perhaps because of this, I did feel that the story itself weakened the further it drifted from its inspiration (though this is not, and does not attempt to be, a 1:1 retelling, which is perhaps why it ultimately serves well as one). The essence of the characters feels a bit removed here, albeit expectedly in this different time and place (Clytemnestra most notably doesn’t really carry over)—while seething and festering are still the driving forces at play, they take on a somewhat different shape. The first half of the book is, in my opinion, the strongest; it fell off a bit in the latter for me, but I still understood and appreciated what it aimed to portray and a chieve. I do recommend reading this in one go, if possible, to keep up the momentum and sort of trancelike experience, or at least in one day!

The writing, for me, stylistically, is at the heart of this book, and I really loved it. I don’t think it will be for everyone, but if you love language, mythology, gothic surrealism, and the rot in family trees, I highly recommend it!

3.25/5.

This was a really unique book, and it did a lot of things different—especially for a first novel!—which I can wholeheartedly appreciate and that got me hooked after some time. I'm a sucker for Greek myth retellings, and I'm happy to say that this one did not disappoint. This book, once I got over the initial hurdles (see below), felt like a pocket of a nightmare that I'd keep waking up from only to find myself still in a dream—and I walked away feeling a very neat sense of unease that I don't find in books often, even as an avid horror enjoyer.

Much of the text is told between POV switches (even between first and third), bridged by certain strings of poetry or fragments that linked thoughts and chapters together in a way that I haven't ever really seen before, and I do think it was able to be pulled off! That said, this method of storytelling (which I consider to be incredibly effective, given I finished the last 80% of the book in one sitting without even realizing) comes at a moderate cost—that is, making the first part of the text dizzying and confusing to understand and making it difficult to differentiate between the voices of protagonists Orrie and Emma. I think the book would further shine if this sense of disorientation placed upon the reader would only begin to creep in more noticeably after about the first third to better align with the influence of the Furies in the myth and allow us to experience the protagonists' confusion and fear more directly.

Casey also writes in a style that is distinctly very choppy and has a certain narrative voice that focuses on more how the sentences should be said rather than how easily they read, which I do think helped to give character to Orrie but made me struggle with the immersion and understanding of the text at a few points.

Overall, this is a really unique novel that managed to both keep the essence of the retelling and make it enjoyable from a literary standpoint! I'll be really excited to see more of Casey's work in the future.

Thank you to the author, NetGalley, & Lanternfish Press for the ARC!