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Item Barcode | Collection | Call Number | Status | Item Holds |
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Summary
Summary
New York Times Bestseller
"A moving, beautifully etched picture of America''s lost and profoundly lonely." --Kazuo Ishiguro, author of The Remains of the Day and winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature
"Brilliant . . . Darnielle is a master at building suspense, and his writing is propulsive and urgent; it''s nearly impossible to stop reading . . . [ 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
" Grows in menace as the pages stack up . . . [But] more sensitive than one would expect from a more traditional tale of dread."
--Joe Hill, New York Times Book Review
Life in a small town takes a dark turn when mysterious footage begins appearing on VHS cassettes at the local Video Hut . So begins Universal Harvester , t he haunting and masterfully unsettling new novel from John Darnielle, author of the New York Times Bestseller and National Book Award Nominee Wolf in White Van
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.
In 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.
"This chilling literary thriller follows a video store clerk as he deciphers a macabre mystery through clues scattered among the tapes his customers rent. A page-tuning homage to In Cold Blood and The Ring. "
--O: The Oprah Magazine
"[ 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
" Universal Harvester is a novel about noticing hidden things, particularly the hurt and desperation that people bear under their exterior of polite reserve . . . Mr. Darnielle possesses the clairvoyant''s gift for looking beneath the surface."
--Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
"[ Universal Harvester is] constantly unnerving, wrapped in a depressed dread that haunts every passage. But it all pays off with surprising emotionality."
--Kevin Nguyen, GQ.com
Author Notes
John Darnielle is a writer, composer, guitarist, and vocalist for the band the Mountain Goats. He has also written several books including Black Sabbath's Master of Reality and Wolf in White Van: A Novel.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Beginning on the cusp of the 2000s and spanning more than 25 years, the second novel from Darnielle (Wolf in White Van) is a slow-burn mystery/thriller whose characters are drawn together by an eerie discovery. In his early 20s, Jeremy Heldt lives with his father, Steve-Jeremy's mother was killed in a car accident six years before-and bides his time clerking at the Video Hut in Nevada, Iowa, waiting for better prospects to arise. It's a steady job that keeps him out of the house, though things turn weird when customers begin to report dark, disjointed, unnerving movies-within-the-movies on their rented VHS tapes. At first reluctant to become involved in tracking down the origin of the clips, Jeremy, at the urging of his acquaintance Stephanie Parsons, uncovers the tragic decades-long story behind the videos and experiences an unsavory side of Iowa that he never imagined could exist. Powerfully evoking the boredom and salt-of-the-earth determination of Jeremy, his friends, and a haunted survivor determined to redress a great loss, Darnielle adeptly juggles multiple stories that collide with chaotic consequences somewhere in the middle of nowhere. With a nod to urban legends and friend-of-a-friend tales, the author prepares readers for the surreal truth, the improbable events that "have form, and shape, and weight, and meaning." Agent: Chris Parris-Lamb, the Gernert Company. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Library Journal Review
Far from a midcareer side project, this unsettling second novel from the frontman of indie folk band The Mountain Goats confirms the promise of his National Book Award-nominated debut, Wolf in White Van. Jeremy Heldt is working at the Video Hut in small-town Iowa during the late 1990s when a customer returns her VHS rental, complaining that another movie appears to have been spliced in-not much action, just some faint breathing. Soon after, another customer reports something similar, this one involving a figure in a chair with a bag tied around its head. Jeremy's boss Sarah Jane recognizes the barn in this second video and ultimately gives up the video store trying to find answers. From this spooky premise, Darnielle goes further into an oblique, moving meditation on grief: Jeremy's mother was killed in a car accident when he was younger, and the woman whose barn Sarah Jane identifies lost her mother to a religious sect more than 20 years earlier. Their losses haunt the novel, as does the foreboding Iowa landscape. VERDICT Darnielle's contemporary ghost story may confound with its elusiveness (who is the mysterious "I" narrator?), but its impact will stick with readers. [See Prepub Alert, 8/15/16.]-Michael Pucci, South Orange P.L., NJ © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.