Nebraska is the setting through which Burt and Vicky approach Gatlin, and its ordinary agricultural landscape gradually becomes an instrument of unease. The state is first named as a simple geographical answer, but the journey soon reveals a place where cornfields, outmoded signs, religious messages, and an empty town converge into the story’s central landscape of isolation and danger.

Agricultural Landscape and First Impressions

The countryside initially offers recognizably rural details: farmhouses and outbuildings appear as the cornfields recede from the road, chickens peck in a yard, and faded advertisements remain on barn roofs. A billboard declares that only Jesus saves. These details make Nebraska seem legible as farmland and small-town America, but their combination with the unoccupied café and the old pickup in its lot begins to unsettle that familiarity.

The journey toward Gatlin is marked by material signs of a community out of step with the present. A town-entry sign gives its population as 5,431, while a nearby gas station still advertises regular fuel at 35.9 and high-test at 38.9. Vicky recognizes that these prices belong to years earlier, and Burt agrees that they have been obsolete for at least four years. The discrepancy makes the apparently ordinary roadside scene evidence of a deeper absence: in town, they see no cars at all.

Burt registers Nebraska through sound and smell as well as scenery. The streets are silent, and the fertilizer odor differs from the rural smell he remembers from upstate New York. There, the seasonal smell of manure is associated in his mind with spring, fields, and the approach of summer; here, he detects a sickly-sweet undertone that recalls death. The contrast turns an agricultural commonplace into a warning, while keeping the unease rooted in Burt’s own associations rather than in an abstract description of the state.

Gatlin and the Religious Landscape

Gatlin appears below a gentle rise as a town of only three blocks, resembling a Depression-era film set. Dusty, diseased elms line the streets; the houses are plain wood with screened porches, and their lawns look yellow and dispirited. The town’s modest scale and worn infrastructure sharpen the contradiction between its boastful welcome sign and its evident abandonment.

The religious presence is audible before it is fully understood. A radio preacher’s voice, broadcasting nearby from a red tower visible above the corn, proclaims atonement and salvation. Later, Burt notices a church sermon board announcing a sermon on the power and grace of He Who Walks Behind the Rows, dated July 24, 1976. Nebraska is thus not merely the region surrounding Gatlin: it is where a local religious vocabulary is attached directly to the cornfields and presented as the organizing belief of the community.

The church’s objects and texts make that belief material. Vicky finds a crucifix fashioned from dried corn husk, cornsilk, and a small cob whose remaining kernels form a rough figure. Inside the church, Burt encounters a book whose cover declares that the iniquitous must be cut down so the ground can become fertile again. These artifacts link religious judgment to agricultural fertility, giving the landscape’s cultivation a moral and ritual significance.

Corn, Sacrifice, and Significance

The Nebraska cornfields eventually cease to read as ordinary farmland. Burt notices that the corn is unnaturally flawless: its leaves and stalks show no blight or damage, and there are no weeds. The perfection is a marked departure from the imperfections expected in a real field, making the crop itself an uncanny presence rather than a passive backdrop.

The clearing in the corn becomes the site where the community’s sacrificial order is disclosed. The children gather there before the bodies of Burt and Vicky and the remains of earlier victims. Isaac announces that the Age of Favor has been lowered from nineteen plantings and harvestings to eighteen, and the children understand that this change places those who have reached eighteen at risk. The corn, the measure of years in plantings and harvests, and the community’s religious rule are bound together in the Nebraska setting.

Afterward, the girls make more corn-cob crucifixes in an effort to ward off further evil, while those now above the newly lowered age threshold silently enter the corn and go to the clearing. Nebraska’s agricultural landscape therefore carries both the story’s rural surface and its underlying system of belief: the same crop that sustains the community supplies its sacred imagery, measures its age rule, and conceals the place of sacrifice.