Universal Harvester Finds True Horror in Loss and Regret

Jeremy lives in the small town of Nevada, Iowa (long “a,” like nevayda.) His days are spent at the Video Hut, the local video store (this is the year 2000, so such a place still exists), tending to the cinematic needs of a steady stream of regular customers. His evenings are spent in quiet dinners with his father, dodging questions about his future, neither of them really able to connect since Jeremy’s mother died in an accident years earlier. When a local schoolteacher returns a copy of the Boris Karloff classic Targets, an early film by Peter Bogdanovich about a sniper who preys on civilians, becoming an almost otherworldly killing machine. The teacher complains there’s something else on the tape, something strange.
Soon, other tapes start popping up, their Hollywood offerings spliced together with strange images of the inside of a shed at night. Against their better judgement, Jeremy and his boss, Sarah Jane, begin investigating, and uncover something bizarre in the Iowa countryside, with deep ties to both the future and the past.
As horror goes, The Ring this isn’t; the terror is quieter, eerier, more subdued. We follow Jeremy and the other inhabitants of Nevada through their daily lives, and the melancholy atmosphere and ominous narration create the feeling that there’s something slightly off about the town, even before the first tape finds its way into Jeremy’s hands. When the tapes make their way into the story, the ominous atmosphere grows slowly more oppressive, as a sense of dread blankets the narrative.
As footage on the tapes grows more disjointed and disturbing, the narration follows suit; how else to explain an offhanded observation about how easily cries for help get lost in a cornfield? It’s a testament to Darnielle’s skill that we never really notice the splice, the shift into a darker story.

While the (nominal) horror story forms a spine for the novel, Universal Harvester is more concerned with its characters: how they cope with loss, grief, and these terrifying events that lies outside of context. Darnielle lingers on small moments, whether it’s in the quiet morning after Jeremy’s family accidentally watches a spliced tape, or the comments the local schoolteacher makes about moving out of Nevada after she joins in on the investigation. The narrator plays along, sketching out possible futures for each character, imaging what might happen if they took another path, before concluding we can only ever really proceed in one direction. Even the person making the tapes is treated with understanding; monsters are rarely as monstrous as we’d like to think
Universal Harvester might be about the journey as much as the destination, but the journey is unsettling and intriguing enough to warrant a trip down its quiet, wandering roads. John Darnielle has crafted a moving meditation on loss and coping that sets the bar high for any dark fiction that comes after it, a true literary horrorshow.
Universal Harvester is available now.