Items related to Universal Harvester: A Novel
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.
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Review:
An Amazon Best Book of February 2017: In Nevada, Iowa, in the late 90s, someone is splicing creepy home footage into the videocassettes rented from the Video Hut. You might be enjoying a Boris Karloff classic with some popcorn when the narrative is disconcertingly interrupted by a few moments of someone breathing heavily in the dark, or maybe something more sinister waits for viewers of She’s All That. And despite obvious reservations, Jeremy, treading water as a clerk following his mother’s sudden death years earlier, can’t stop watching. A few of the clips seem to betray local landmarks, and what self-respecting meddling kid could resist checking it out? This may sound like the set-up for a good thriller, but Universal Harvester is much stranger than that. Darnielle – whose unorthodox debut novel, Wolf in White Van, was nominated for the National Book Award – has written an understated slow burn of a book, lean on plot but dense in mood and dread. Darnielle is more interested in what ferments in the dark corners of our universal experiences – how we cope with loss and absence and the ways that they bend us, the peculiar ways we become bent. In fact, if ambiguity isn’t your thing, you might look elsewhere. People might be filming unnerving things in dilapidated, farm country outbuildings, but the pat, Psycho-style explanation is not forthcoming. Universal Harvester is like a David Lynch adaptation of a Marilynne Robinson novel, where manicured grass is replaced by fields of corn, but the bugs squirming beneath are the same. --Jon Foro, The Amazon Book Review
About the Author:
JOHN DARNIELLE’s first novel, Wolf in White Van, was a New York Times bestseller, a National Book Award nominee and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for first fiction, and was widely hailed as one of the best novels of the year. He is the writer, composer, guitarist and vocalist for the band the Mountain Goats. He lives in Durham, North Carolina, with his wife and sons.
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- PublisherHarper Perennial
- Publication date2019
- ISBN 10 1443452734
- ISBN 13 9781443452731
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages224
- Rating
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