A New York Times Bestseller
An Amazon.com Best Book of the Month
“A meditation on loss, faith and the nature of family, threaded through with mysteries. . . . The novel is better than scary: Universal Harvester is genuinely haunting.” —National Post
“Brilliant. . . . A major work by an author who is quickly becoming one of the brightest stars in American fiction.” ―Los Angeles Times
“A slow burn of a book. . . . Like a David Lynch adaptation of a Marilynne Robinson novel.” —Amazon.com
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, the haunting and masterfully unsettling new novel from John Darnielle, author of the New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist Wolf in White Van
Late 1990s: Jeremy works at the Video Hut in Nevada, Iowa. It’s good enough for Jeremy: it’s a job, quiet and predictable, and it gets him out of the house.
But then customers begin to come in with the same eerie complaint: there is something on the tapes other than the movie they’ve rented.
Jeremy doesn’t want to be curious, but he brings the movies home to take a look. And, indeed, part of each movie is replaced by a few minutes of jagged, poorly lit home video. The scenes are odd and sometimes violent, dark and deeply disquieting. They have been shot just outside of town.
In Universal Harvester, praised by reviewers as haunting, unsettling and almost Lynchian in scope, once-placid Iowa fields and farmhouses become sinister and imbued with loss and instability and profound foreboding. A surreal meditation on loss, the novel takes Jeremy and those around him deeper into this worrying landscape than they 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.
“Darnielle writes beautifully . . . He builds a deep sense of foreboding by giving pieces of the puzzle in such a way that you really can’t see the solution until that final piece is in place.”
