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Family myth and superstition mingle in the Ozarks in the talented new novel The Legend of the Albino Farm. One part Bridge to Terabithia, one part Bag of Bones, Steve Yates’s novel is full of haunting scenes and stories that blur the line between reality and nightmare…Yates’s writing is confident and controlled. The lingo of the 1950s, as well as historic details, makes The Albino Farm almost disturbingly believable. Alternately wholesome and spine-tingling, the novel is full of surprises. Yates isn’t afraid to take risks, and the reward is an unusual, smart paranormal fantasy that effortlessly blends elements of the midcentury Midwest with classic ghost-story imagery. The Legend of the Albino Farm is satisfying, suspenseful, and full of good old-fashioned scares. - Foreword Review

“Steve Yates has crafted a wonderful, suspenseful tale that will haunt and mesmerize its readers. The Sheehys are a grand old family from the Missouri Ozarks whose estate has fallen on tough times and become the source of local legend. Hetienne Sheehy is due to inherit the place but she has long suffered visions of terrible foreboding regarding her future there. As her story is told and her premonitions come true, the fragility of the human psyche and the power of myth to rule our lives is revealed. Like William Gay and Daniel Woodrell, Yates mines the fertile ground of his home state and constructs a world that the reader will not soon forget.” –Cody Morrison, Square Books, Oxford MS

“The Legend of the Albino Farm is a rollicking tale of inherited demons, apocalyptic visions, loss, longing, and love—in other words, the story of a family, although told through the cracked lens of Yates’ wild, unblinking eye. This unconventional saga is a gripping, joyful read.”—Sabina Murray (author of current New York Times Notable Book Valiant Gentlemen and Pen/Faulkner Award Winner The Caprices)

“A dazzling cautionary tale of the dangers of a self-fulfilling prophecy. In beautiful, hauntingly atmospheric prose, Steve Yates tells of the legends and myths that surround the slow fall into decrepitude of a once-magnificent family estate. The boundaries of fact and fiction, superstition and belief blur together in this complex and gripping novel, which suggests, ultimately, that perhaps families are the most unknowable mysteries of all.” –Alex George

In the same way Faulkner built of his “postage stamp of earth” a realm at once richly mythological and firmly localized, so Steve Yates returns in this, his fifth book, to the haunted, haunting land of his childhood, the usually overlooked Missouri Ozarks. The Albino Farm is about myths and legends, about inheritance and free will. Its compelling saga, rendered with lush and sometimes startling language, takes its readers deeply into itself and does not let them go.”—Beth Ann Fennelly

“Yates’ vision seems as much Shakespearean as Southern in this beautifully written blend of family saga and fantastical tale. He seems able to merge, as in a long strange dream, current times with the ever-present past. This world is put before us, inscrutably real.”—Brad Watson

STEVE YATES

THE LEGEND OF THE ALBINO FARM

The Legend of the Albino Farm is a horror story turned inside out. What if a thriving family were saddled with an unshakable spook tale? And what if that lore cursed them with an unending whirlwind of destruction from thrill seekers, partiers, bikers, and Goths? Hettienne Sheehy is about to inherit this devouring legacy. Last child to bear a once golden name, she is heiress to a sprawling farm in the Missouri Ozarks. During summer, childhood idylls in the late 1940s, Hettienne has foreseen all this apocalyptic fury in frightening, mystifying visions. Haunted by a whirling augury, by a hurtful spook tale, and by a property that seems to doom all who would dare own it, in the end, Hettienne will risk everything to save the family she truly loves.

See video of author Steve Yates discussing the book…

Why write The Legend of the Albino Farm from Steven B Yates on Vimeo.

$16.00 | Paperback | 5 1/2 x 8 1/4 | 224 pages

April 2017

ISBN: 978-1-60953-140-9 | Carton Quantity: 24

EISBN: 978-1-60953-139-3

On the northern border of Springfield, Missouri, there once was a great house surrounded by emerald woods, lake, and meadow, a home place and farm that, to the lasting sorrow of its owners and heirs, acquired a nonsensical legend marring all memory of its glory days. The estate became known and is still known, if it is remembered at all, as The Albino Farm.

The legend, which began to circulate in town just after the Second World War, had no basis in anything like the truth. Albinos did not live on the farm. Never had. They certainly were never tortured there. No one ever was. And who in their right mind would hire an albino for a caretaker? A vast Irish Catholic family, the Sheehys, farmed on 330 acres and lived there in that thirteen-room mansion across the highway from Green Hills Cemetery. If they seemed pale, it was in the winter months. They were, even the women, strikingly tall, all with long faces. Aloof. Better than the rest of Springfield. And strange.

It was Hettienne that the Sheehys worried most about. The young girl had been vigorous, giddy, with fine and flowing blonde hair, symmetrical proportions, and a penchant for any game that involved running and screaming. But when she turned thirteen she suffered episodes of catatonia, somnambulism, and jags of mystifying talk. Lost in these fits, Hettienne saw what was coming for her family—a chaos, a curse, the legend that would haunt her for the rest of her life.

On the train with her parents in 1946 traveling down from Chicago for their annual summer visit to the Old Sheehy Place, she fretted. Beneath the tan sunlight lancing through the narrow windows, something was breaking open, she could sense it, like the rupture of peeling skin beneath which shined startling, white flesh. This trip her legs cramped against tabletops. When she extended them, they jutted like two monstrous icicles.

As the dining car banged across trestles above the sparkling Osage River, a woman tottered around her with newspapers rolled under each arm and steaming coffee sloshing.

“Sit up straight,” her father whispered. “Hettienne….” John Sheehy paused and gave the apologetic traveler the flat hint of a smile, his lips tight as a stitch. “Hettienne,” he resumed once the woman passed, “you may very well be The Last Sheehy.”

Steve Yates is the author of the Knickerbocker Prize-winning Sandy and Wayne: A Novella, the Juniper Prize-winning Some Kinds of Love: Stories, and the novels Morkan’s Quarry and its sequel The Teeth of the Souls. The recipient of three individual artist fellowships from the Mississippi Arts Commission and another from the Arkansas Arts Council, he lives in Flowood, MS. Born and raised in Springfield MO (the setting for this novel) Yates is the associate director and the marketing director at University Press of Mississippi.

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