The Farmhouse (Chelsea Conradt)

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The Farmhouse by Chelsea Conradt: A Commanding Tale of Secrets Unleashed

Beneath the corn’s rustle, under Nebraska’s endless sky, lies a darkness that refuses to stay buried.

Chelsea Conradt’s debut adult thriller, The Farmhouse, is a masterfully haunting novel that blurs the boundaries between psychological tension and supernatural dread. Released on June 17, 2025, by Poisoned Pen Press, it introduces a world where isolation becomes a prison, grief sharpens reality into splinters, and the very land seems to murmur warnings.

Emily Hauk, uprooted by her mother’s death, believes a wind-swept farm in rural Nebraska will soothe her sorrow. Her husband Josh sees it as a pragmatic escape from San Francisco, offering space, affordability, and emotional distance from loss. But the land is not a blank canvas for healing—it’s a mirror of unsettled pasts. The tagline—“Every woman who has lived on this farm has died. Emily just moved in.”—hints at the malevolence woven into the soil long before she arrived Barnes & NobleNetGalley.

Arriving at the farmhouse, Emily’s hope quickly fractures. The barn shifts location from day to day, as if possessing its own will. Her late mother’s favorite music drifts hauntingly across the cornfields. Blood appears inexplicably in a farmhand’s truck. Screams pierce the quiet nights—Josh calls them foxes, but Emily feels something deeper, more predatory Barnes & Noble.

As she investigates, fragments of the farm’s history come to light: A teenage girl disappeared three years prior, her mother dying under unexplained circumstances shortly thereafter. Digging deeper, Emily discovers a long pattern—women tied to the land who met dark fates. Their stories were buried, dismissed, erased Barnes & Noble. The farm, it seems, is less a setting and more a force—cold, calculating, predatory.

Conradt’s prose elevates the landscape into a character. The cornfields’ shifting heights become sentient. Sunlight contours the dust with uncanny stillness. The farmhouse breathes in stale exhalations of memory. Tension lingers in every quiet corner—preferred over jump scares, this slow-burn dread intensifies, pushing readers toward unrelenting suspense.

Emily is no passive observer. Her grief is raw and vivid, yet it becomes fuel for survival. As supernatural echoes fill her home, she resists Josh’s rational dismissals and societal disbelief. His skepticism—the implication that Emily’s visions are grief or fatigue—mimics real-world gaslighting, trapping her in a cage woven with doubt. But instead of retreating, Emily confronts both the darkness in the fields and the silence at home.

Flooded with emotional clarity, Conradt uses Emily’s running habit as both coping mechanism and metaphor. Logs of her miles become markers of unraveling—each stride colliding with fear, memory, and mounting defiance. Emily’s journey transforms gradually: from vulnerable widow to relentless seeker of truth, determined to uncover what the earth urgently tries to hide.

Critical acclaim echoes the tension and resonance of the novel. Kristen Simmons calls it “a smart, chilling, ferociously feminist thriller.” Lish McBride praises how it weaves rustic beauty into pastoral nightmares that linger long after the last page. Molly Harper emphasizes its claustrophobic power—the farmland offers nothing but suffocating dread, even in broad daylight. Jaye Wells humorously warns to watch for “stalker barns.” Authors Kelley Armstrong, Rachel Fikes, Nalini Singh, Kate Wiley, Christa Carmen, and others all highlight its stunning atmosphere, twisty depth, and emotional force.

Beneath its ghostly veneer, The Farmhouse pulses with social critique. Conradt doesn’t simply scare; she interrogates real terror—how grief isolates, how women’s fears are minimized, how rural isolation becomes a trap. The institutionally protected silence that deflects attention away from violence is at once haunting and familiar. Emily’s ultimate confrontation with the farmhouse’s legacy becomes a reckoning with patriarchy, with inertia, with voices that have been too easily forgotten.

The novel’s climax offers catharsis tinged with lingering dread. Emily breaks free of her emotional shackles, claiming both her truth and the farmhouse as hers—not to inhabit, but to redeem. Whether that redemption is peace or just another beginning, the reader leaves charged with reflection.

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