Universal Harvester
John Darnielle, 2017
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
224 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780374282103
Summary
Jeremy works at the Video Hut in Nevada, Iowa. It’s a small town in the center of the state—the first a in Nevada pronounced "ay."
This is the late 1990s, and even if the Hollywood Video in Ames poses an existential threat to Video Hut, there are still regular customers, a rush in the late afternoon.
It’s good enough for Jeremy: it’s a job, quiet and predictable, and it gets him out of the house, where he lives with his dad and where they both try to avoid missing Mom, who died six years ago in a car wreck.
But when a local schoolteacher comes in to return her copy of Targets—an old movie, starring Boris Karloff, one Jeremy himself had ordered for the store—she has an odd complaint: “There’s something on it,” she says, but doesn’t elaborate. Two days later, a different customer returns a different tape, a new release, and says it’s not defective, exactly, but altered: “There’s another movie on this tape.”
Jeremy doesn’t want to be curious, but he brings the movies home to take a look. And, indeed, in the middle of each movie, the screen blinks dark for a moment and the movie is replaced by a few minutes of jagged, poorly lit home video.
The scenes are odd and sometimes violent, dark, and deeply disquieting. There are no identifiable faces, no dialogue or explanation—the first video has just the faint sound of someone breathing— but there are some recognizable landmarks. These have been shot just outside of town.
So begins John Darnielle’s haunting and masterfully unsettling Universal Harvester: the once placid Iowa fields and farmhouses now sinister and imbued with loss and instability and profound foreboding.
The novel will take Jeremy and those around him deeper into this landscape than they have ever expected to go. They will become part of a story that unfolds years into the past and years into the future, part of an impossible search for something someone once lost that they would do anything to regain. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—March 16, 1967
• Where—Bloomington, Indiana, USA
• Raised—Central California
• Education—B.A., Pitzer College
• Currently—lives in Durham, North Carolina
John Darnielle is an American musician and novelist best known as the primary (and often solitary) member of the American band the Mountain Goats, for which he is the writer, composer, guitarist, pianist and vocalist.
Born in Bloomington, Indiana, Darnielle grew up in Central California with an abusive stepfather by the name of Mike Noonan (1940-2004) (as referenced frequently in The Sunset Tree) and after high school, he went to work as a psychiatric nurse at the Metropolitan State Hospital in Norwalk, California.
For a couple of years, he lived on the Metropolitan State grounds, writing songs and playing his guitar when he wasn't working. During this time he began recording some of his songs onto cassette tapes using a Panasonic boombox. Shortly after working at the hospital, Darnielle attended Pitzer College from 1991 to 1995, earning a degree in English.
Throughout his college education he continued to record music. In 1992, Dennis Callaci, a friend of Darnielle's and owner of Shrimper Records, released a tape of Darnielle’s songs called "Taboo VI: The Homecoming". Around that time, the Mountain Goats were born and began touring with just Darnielle on guitar and a bassist, first Rachel Ware and then Peter Hughes.
Darnielle has lived in Grinnell, Iowa; Colo, Iowa; Ames, Iowa; Chicago, Illinois; Portland, Oregon; and Milpitas, CA. He currently resides in Durham, North Carolina with his wife Lalitree Darnielle, a botanist and photographer (who was featured playing the banjo in the band's 1998 EP New Asian Cinema) and son Roman.
Darnielle became a vegetarian in 1996 and a Vegan in 2007. In the same year, he performed at a benefit for the animal welfare organization Farm Sanctuary in Watkins Glen, New York. He performed again at Farm Sanctuary in 2009.
…
Writing
Darnielle's first book, Black Sabbath: Master of Reality, was published in 2008 as part of the 33? series. He writes the "South Pole Dispatch" feature in Decibel Magazine every month and also guest edited the poetry section of The Mays, an anthology of the best creative work coming out of Oxford and Cambridge. His first novel, entitled Wolf In White Van was released in 2014. It was among ten books nominated for the National Book Award for Fiction. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/12/2014.)
Book Reviews
John Darnielle's new novel has gotten a lot of play—both near-raves and some out-and-out raves. One reviewer makes it a point to mention the plot's "enviable looseness." Well, I agree: the plot is loose, but that's its problem. Ultimately, the novel doesn't quite hang together, which is sad because it opens with such promise. So let me start there. READ MORE.
P.J Adler - Litlovers
A captivating exploration of the vagaries of memory and inertia in middle America… [Universal Harvester] serves as a stellar encore after the success of [Darnielle's] debut novel, Wolf in White Van.… Beneath the eerie gauze of this book, I felt an undercurrent of humanity and hope.
Manuel Roig-Franzia - Washington Post
[A] brilliant second novel.… What appears to be a chilling horror tale is also a perfectly rendered story about family and loss.… Darnielle is a master at building suspense, and his writing is propulsive and urgent; it's nearly impossible to stop reading. He's also incredibly gifted at depicting the dark side of the rural Midwest.… [Universal Harvester is] beyond worthwhile; it's a major work by an author who is quickly becoming one of the brightest stars in American fiction.
Michael Schaub - Los Angeles Times
Universal Harvester is a quiet story of grief with the trappings of a Stephen King suspense-thriller.… Its characters are constantly on the move, speeding toward destinations they fear will hold scenes of unspeakable devastation and loss, and Darnielle seamlessly transfers their dread straight into readers’ hearts.… [Universal Harvester is] so wonderfully strange, almost Lynchian in its juxtaposition of the banal and the creepy, that my urge to know what the hell was going on caused me to go full throttle.… [But] Darnielle hides so much beautiful commentary in the book’s quieter moments that you would be remiss not to slow down.
Abram Scharf - MTV News
(Starred review.) [A] slow-burn mystery/thriller.… Darnielle adeptly juggles multiple stories that collide with chaotic consequences…[and] improbable events that have form, and shape, and weight, and meaning.
Publishers Weekly
[U]nsettling.… Darnielle's contemporary ghost story may confound with its elusiveness (who is the mysterious "I" narrator?), but its impact will stick with readers. —Michael Pucci, South Orange P.L., NJ
Library Journal
Darnielle’s masterfully disturbing follow-up to the National Book Award-nominated Wolf in White Van reads like several Twilight Zone scripts cut together by a poet.… All the while, [Darnielle’s] grasp of the Iowan composure-above-all mindset instills the book with agonizing heartbreak. —Daniel Krau
Booklist
Kirkus Reviews
Darnielle’s prose is consistently graceful and empathetic, though plotwise the novel sometimes sputters.… Regardless, Darnielle is operating mainly on a metaphorical plane…what we know, feel, and remember about our families disappears too easily, as if stored on media we lack the devices to play. A smart and rangy yarn.
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to start a discussion for Universal Harvester...then take off on your own:
1. Why might John Darnielle have chosen a sleepy, small town in the middle of Iowa as his setting for this novel?
2. How would you describe Jeremy? Consider, for instance, the fact that better job opportunities pass him by. Or that fact that he falls for girls but never pursues them. What does all this suggest about Jeremy? What about Jeremy's father? What is their relationship and the quality of their life as together as father and son?
3. What role does grief play in this novel, and how does it affect the various characters? In what way does grief, perhaps, unite them thematically?
4. Why does the author provide separate versions of reality, one in which Jeremy moves to a bigger city and finds a better job, and one in which Jeremy stays pub at the Video Hut?
5. What were your original expectations of, or ideas about, the clip embedded into the Target videotape—the dancing woman, the hand painting the hood, the door which gets flipped on its side, and the snippet of speech, "Wait. I did't..."? Did you come to understand what it was about by the novel's end?
6. After her trip to Collins, Sarah Jane talks to Jeremy about her anxiety.
The house,” said Sarah Jane, reaching back into her purse and retrieving the printout of the frame from when my hand slipped and the front porch came into view.
What was your response to the shifting point of view—from third- to first-person—in that passage? What does it do to your sense of Sarah Jane, or your understanding of the novel's narrator?
7. The novel feels like a horror novel without actually finding a monster. In an NPR interview, Darnielle said that he wanted to write about "that moment of dread" that occurs right before "the thing you don't want to see happens." Reading Universal Harvesters, were you gripped by those moments of dread? If so, when did that feeling overtake you?
8. What do you think of the book's ending? Were you satisfied...or let down?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
top of page (summary)