The Cooter Farm

by Matthew F. Jones

" The Cooter Farm  will remind readers of John Irving one minute, Joyce Carol Oates the next. An altogether remarkable debut." - Gene Lyons, Entertainment Weekly
 
"Dickens and Irving are high standards against which to measure any novel, let alone a debut. It's a tribute to  The Cooter Farm  that those are exactly the comparisons invokes." - Steven Kane, Los Angeles Daily News
 
"' The Cooter Farm ' is a novel that defies categorization.  It brings together elements as diverse as the black humor of Flannery O'Connor, the rude hilarity of Kurt Vonnegut, and the nostalgia for childhood of Harper Lee.  A truly amazing first novel." - Sharon Lloyd Stratton, Richmond Times Dispatch
 
When young Ollie Cooter tries to come to grips with the often crazy, sometimes sinister, world of his family's dairy farm in upstate New York, he gradually learns the complexities of human nature. Bewildered by his mother's flight from the confines of the farm and the exaggerated hypochondria of her bull-semen-selling husband, Ollie seeks respite and comfort from the only member of the Cooter clan he trusts, his aunt, Mary Jean, three years his senior.
 
Bound to her by blood, admiration, and love, Ollie joins in her determined attempts to exorcise the evil she believes controls the Cooter world.  As the two explore and expand their knowledge of each other - and of the lives of other members of this rural community - Ollie leaves childhood behind. The terrifying chain of events he witnesses during his eleventh year irrevocably alter him and his family forever.

Genres: Fiction

305 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

Matthew F. Jones is the author of seven novels and several screenplays. His novels have been widely translated and named on several best novels of the year lists. Three of his novels have been made into major motion pictures. Jones wrote the screenplay for the 2013 film adaptation of his acclaimed 1996 novel A Single Shot, a novel Susan Salter Reynolds in a review for the Los Angeles Times described as “The finest portrait of guilt since Crime and Punishment.” Novelist Daniel Woodrell, who reviewed the book in the Washington Post, declared it “One of the finest novels of rural crime and moral horror in the past few decades.” Patrick Andersen in a Washington Post Review of Jones’s novel Boot Tracks termed the phrase ‘literate noir’ to describe the tense, psychological nature of Jones’ work. His latest novel is A Reckoning Up Black Cat hollow (February, 2026). In his review for the Wall Street Journal Tom Nolan described the novel as, “A terrifying and Gothic-tinged story… A Reckoning Up Black Cat Hollow, written in an expressionistic style that evokes such writers as Rimbaud, Dickey, Conrad and (yes) Poe, is a harrowing and unforgettable work.”

Reviews

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

I giggle inside every time I think of the book's title. It could be a book of an entirely different type with that sort of title. Technically, though it is a book about a farm full of Cooters, the Cooters in question happen to be the last name of a white trash family living on a dairy farm better equipped to farm rocks than anything else.

What is it about deranged white trash / Appalachia types that make for great reading? It's almost like a guarantee for a good read if you populate a book with these types. Is it because whatever deranged things they do us more civilized folks just accept it? Incest, rape, murder, creepy family secrets, ghosts and drunkenness: yup that's what those crazy white trash types get up to when they aren't making some lily white weekend warrior squeal like a pig to the sounds of dueling banjos.

The book is told from the point of view of young boy, and it excellently mixes a certain weird innocence with the brutal goings ons within the Cooter family and the surrounding town. I've never read To Kill a Mockingbird, so I don't know if this is really comparable to it, but someone who wrote the book's dust jacket copy, so maybe it is. I imagine this is less genteel and more straight up fucked up than the Harper Lee classic though. Speaking of the dust jacket, one reviewer a Theodore Weesner, author of The Car Thief seemed to love the amount of sex in the book, so if you are looking for a book with quite a few inappropriate couplings then this might be a book to pique your interest also. Oh, or if you just like a good well-written novel with some fucked up-ness to it, it will be a good book to read for that, too.

[knig · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit of Southern gothic smeared onto the periphery of New York state: how can it possibly work? Only as a bit of respite reading in the in between.

One of my sparring partners says you don’t need to go the North Pole to know its darn cold up there. True, but if you’ve never been outside the Sahara, try describing cold! Same principle applies here: an apple pie and white picket fence man trying to imagine what trailer trash might look like.

Hopeless. You either GET visceral, downtrodden, gutter snipe, backwater Hicksville, or you don’t. Harry Crews does. Jones does not.
Still.

We all need an amuse bouche in between.

[Audrey (Warped Shelves) · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you think I only picked up this book because the title makes me chortle you would be absolutely correct. Imagine my surprise when The Cooter Farm turned out to be one of the best country noirs I have ever read.

Excellent pacing, intriguing plot, and believable and realistic characters aside, what sticks with me most about this novel is the haunting past-tense narration resembling a coming-of-age memoir. I simply did not want to put this book down until I reached the conclusion.

This book deserves a standing ovation. Less than 50 ratings? Five reviews to date? The Cooter Farm needs a second wind. This book is worth knowing.


POPSUGAR 2015 Reading Challenge: A book by an author you've never read before

[Brian Tucker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like a poor man's Tobacco Road, it has humor and dark spots.

[Randall myers · Rating 5 out of 5]

excellent read

Thoroughly enjoyed The Cooter Farm. What great characters that you grow to love and hate. I read the whole book in one sitting

[Christine · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't know what it is about these odd type of stories that I like to read this time of year. The Cooter family runs a dairy farm. Hooter, Looted and Scooter Hooter... No seriously, but I dubbed Hooter the Crazy Cooter.
The family dynamic is dysfunctional in every way possible.. but a fun read just to make you feel normal.