UNIVERSAL HARVESTER

Fiction

Desperate cries muffled

UNIVERSAL HARVESTER
By John Darnielle
224 pp. Farrar, Straus and Giroux 

Reviewed by Sarah Corbett Morgan

Jeremy works at the Video Hut in Nevada (pronounced Nev-ay-da), Iowa. It’s the sort of store where we rented VHS tapes back in the ’90s before the advent of Hulu, HBO, and other streaming services. Things are pretty low-key in Nevada, as well as at his job, but one afternoon a woman returns one of the tapes and says, “There’s something on this one.” And so begins John Darnielle’s second novel, Universal Harvester, a beautiful, haunting, and at times creepy story full of loss.

It takes Jeremy a while, but he finally gets around to watching the film at home where he lives with his dad, Steve. His mom died in a car wreck some years before, and the two grown men share a pleasant enough bachelor’s life. Steve does suggest to his son from time to time that there might be better opportunities for employment beyond the Video Hut.  

While watching the VHS tape in question, there is a flash of light and then what appears to be a home movie shot in black-and-white with a single camera. An empty barn. A chair. Jeremy can hear the sound of someone breathing and sees there is a time code at the bottom of the screen. It’s blank. Other people return more videos with more footage. 

Darnielle weaves the story of Jeremy’s discovery, the loss of his mother, and the disappearance of another wife and mother some 30 years before. He then sprints ahead in time to a California family who has bought an old farmhouse where they discover piles of VHS tapes in the basement. All these people help Jeremy converge on the truth.   

The structure of the book is scattered and a bit hard to follow, but I was driven forward—flipping pages—to find out what happened. I suppose this book could be compared to a sort of Twilight Zone study of disappearance and loss. Indeed, Darnielle’s writing is permeated with a brooding sense of grief of things changed, things lost to us, things that might appear benign but then again might not be. There are remarkable passages about rural Iowa and excellent countrified local dialogue. 

It is evident that the author's previous life as the singer-songwriter of his band, The Mountain Goats, is at play here. But make no mistake, this is no mere folksong lyricist turned writer. Darnielle has great talent and delves deep into the mysteries we often choose to ignore or push aside. He takes us to the darker side of peaceful places like rural Iowa with its abandoned houses and acres of corn. It turns out that idyllic agrarian scene we might have driven past on a cross-country trip is rife with connotations. 

At first, Darnielle describes those acres of corn as a landscape where sound is quickly muffled by the high stalks. If we walk out into them, rather than drive by, we might call “Hello!” just to test the sound quality. Then he suggests that perhaps they are more perilous than bucolic. He writes, “There are other times when people go into the fields and yell different things: ‘Help!’ for example, often repeatedly with increasing volume, or ‘Where are you taking me?’ But nobody usually hears them.” 

Universal Harvester is not Stephen King creepy, the sort of story that leads to the eventual Boo! moment, but Darnielle creates a mysterious, inexplicable sort of tension that keeps us on our seat’s edge until we discover the horror. And when we do, we have come to know and care about all of those involved.