Universal Harvester: A Novel

By John Darnielle

Life in a small town takes a dark turn when mysterious footage begins appearing on VHS cassettes at the local Video Hut

Jeremy works at the Video Hut in Nevada, Iowa—a small town in the center of the state, the first “a” in Nevada pronounced “ay.” This is the late 1990s, and while 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 She’s All That, a new release, and complains that there’s something wrong with it: “There’s another movie on this tape.”

Jeremy doesn’t want to be curious. But he takes a look and, indeed, in the middle of the movie the screen blinks dark for a moment and She’s All That is replaced by a black-and-white scene, shot in a barn, with only the faint sounds of someone breathing. Four minutes later, She’s All That is back. But there is something profoundly unsettling about that scene; Jeremy’s compelled to watch it three or four times. The scenes recorded onto Targets are similar, undoubtedly created by the same hand. Creepy. And the barn looks much like a barn just outside of town.

There will be no ignoring the disturbing scenes on the videos. And all of a sudden, what had once been the placid, regular old Iowa fields and farmhouses now feels haunted and threatening, imbued with loss and instability and profound foreboding. For Jeremy, and all those around him, life will never be the same . . .

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Feb 7, 2017
• ISBN: 9781443452748

John Darnielle

John Darnielle’s first novel, Wolf in White Van, was a New York Times bestseller, National Book Award nominee, and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for first fiction, and 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.

Reviews for Universal Harvester

[zoes_human · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I don't really know what happened here, but I enjoyed the trip.

[whitewavedarling · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In the first part of this book, I simply couldn't put it down. The creepiness of it and the gorgeous writing had me sucked in completely. Then, when Part 2 started near the halfway mark of the book, the turn the book took just didn't keep me engaged like the earlier part had. The writing was still fantastic, the story still interesting, but there was enough of a let-down in tension and creepiness that it absolutely changed the read for me. Toward the end, some of the feelings from the beginning were coming back, but in the end, I'm still not sure how I feel about the book. I am anxious to read something else by the author, though, so that alone says something.

[tobinelliott · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Okay, this ended better than I'd hoped but I'm afraid that's most of the positives I can throw out here.

Darnielle spends a lot of time setting up characters. Too much time, to be honest, especially for the very little payback you get from them.

You know a lot of details about the characters, but almost nothing about what drives them. Why did Irene fall in with the strange church? Why was Jeremy content to let it all lie? Why was Stephanie in the novel at all?

Far far too much happens off screen. I understand that the author's trying to maintain the suspense, but to never let us inside some of the events? Yeah, yeah, I get it. He's trying to parallel the experience of the mysterious videos intercut into popular movies.

Unfortunately, he gives us so little to go on, so much extraneous detail, and no solid motivations, that this book--that could have been wildly compelling--instead is mildly interesting at best, and overindulgent and meandering at worst.

[modioperandi · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Universal Harvester is good. It is also confusing. Confusing in the best way possible. It's so confusing and I held my head really hard in some places because I had lost the thread again, but that's exactly what I thought was so great. Like that had to have been the effect in mind with this one. I read it twice and same feeling. This is the effect Darnielle is going for and it works so very well. The book confuses you at first, then comes with a surprise, then comes the confusing twist, then a little bit of clarity, again confusion, a dramatic turning point, then again a bunch of confusion and finally the confusing plot twist with a strange ending. It is totally beautiful.In a small town video store in the middle of Iowa, strange and eerie snippets of film appear on the rental cassettes. Dark and grainy scenes showing a barn with an empty chair in it, breathing noises can be heard. In later clips a woman appears, first tied up and with a hood over her head, then running through a corn field - on the run from the cameraman. The video store employee Jeremy wants nothing to do with the matter, but when his friend Stephanie recognizes the barn in the film scenes, he has to act. The search for the truth behind the videos takes Jeremy and Stephanie back in time. I really liked the setting very much. VHS rental shop and a rural area. Simply an optimal basic setting for a thriller! You never really know where you were and more and more such disturbing tape scenes appeared, as a reader got this dark and fearful atmosphere that worked great with everything.The tapes. The scenes with the tapes were really the best part of the whole novel. Darnielle's full narrative talent was only able to reveal itself here: Actually, he had only described a tape scene, which, due to the choice of words, sounded so good that you thought you could just look at it on the screen. A masterpiece! The characters were also great. And the novel is all about them and the writing is so natural and the characters are legit they are real. It is all just totally drenched in horrific reality. There are real people here who acted logically in some places and not in others - just like in real life. Sometimes you just don't know why you're doing something and sometimes you do and that's all. Devastating.This book was a real experience. The prose like Darnielles other three books is drenched in a Californian accent and pacing that I deeply feel you can only know if you grew up here or at the very least came here and paid attention to the people around you.Like all John Darnielles work it is beautiful and hopeful and depressing and devastating. All of that in the best way possible. Go listen to the Goats.Also the audiobook is a MUST have. It's another read by Darnielle. So stinking good!!Epic. Loved and I also loved this one, read it in mid 2018 after Wolf in White Van and having just read his 33 1/3 Masters of Reality I needed to get this down.

[kemilyh1988 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The first section really creeped me out, but the story got jumbled and went downhill from there.

[heather_brock-1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I had high hopes for this but was sorely let down.

[adzebill · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

What seems to be a horror novel becomes an eerie story of loneliness and loss, beautifully told. A shame this seems to be disappointing to many readers, who were expecting some kind of Blair Witch Project (the author even drops a reference to this). It's better seen as a mystery, where most but not all is explained at the end.

[kateprice88 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I was intrigued by the synopsis of this book, despite hearing some mixed opinions. Universal Harvester by John Darnelle is a mysterious tale, one that evokes a sense of horror in early chapters, but ultimately winds up pittering out with too many characters and an ever shifting point of view.Jamie works in a video rental store that’s still open despite a rise in DVDs and low clientele. When one of his customers says that there’s something wrong with the video tape she rented, he doesn’t think about it too much. More and more people begin to say the same, though, and Jamie decides to look into it. Someone has taped short, disturbing clips of two or three minute segments over VHS tapes. They all seem to be in the same place, somewhere that his boss feels she’s seen before. Soon they find themselves drawn into this great question.The book starts slowly, but is intriguing nonetheless. Jamie’s passivity, his lack of direction, comes really comes through the narrative. Unlike others, he isn’t overly interested in why or how these segments have appeared on these video tapes. They’ve frightened and unsettled him, yes, but doesn’t want to get involved in any sort of bizarre and possibly dangerous ordeal. I liked Jaime, and while I did wish that the story would hurry up and get to the more interesting parts, I was quite invested.Yet, just when the stories pacing became faster everything came to a screeching halt. The main character changed. The setting changed. The time period change. Everything changed. Despite the whiplash, I enjoyed this section, too. The story was beginning to wrap back around to the first set of characters. The same uneasiness that pervaded the first section slowly wormed its way in. I was invested, interested to see where things went and what light was shed on the overarching plot.And then we had a new main character once again. Every time I found myself truly invested with the characters they were replaced with new ones. Every time things got really interesting and more questions were opened, the plot switched tracks. This is supposed to be a mystery, one where many threads weave together to form the whole. The only problem is that none of those threads are followed through to their conclusion.None of the sections ended satisfactorily. This complex, interwoven tale simply felt flat. The prose was nice. The way the characters were brought to life was wonderful. I truly cared about each new character introduced. It was just as much a story of family as it was a suspenseful, unsettling mystery. Yet, each time the focus changed, I was left hanging. I wanted to know more about what happened with Jamie, yet they were largely left out of the narrative after the first section. No real conclusions were ever made, merely inferences. The focus on Jamie’s family and the ongoing tale about him and his father was again largely forgotten. While more inferences could be made as to how that plot ended we are never given anything concrete, or at least nothing satisfactory. This, I felt, happened with each subplot, and the plot overall. The story meandered, and despite it meandering to interesting places, there was simply no satisfactory conclusions to any of the story’s plots or subplots.The one thing which really drew me out of the story was an odd occurrence ever few chapters. Every once in a while the narrator wouldn’t be an omniscient voice. The narration slipped into first person, as if this were a real person talking to you, the reader. This stark change in narration felt extremely misplaced, coming off as odd during moments that were meant to be serious or say some kind of important, universal truth.In the end, Universal Harvester by John Darnelle wasn’t I am interested to see what else this author has to offer. There is real talent here. Very few authors can make me honestly care about so many characters doing such mundane things, and I will wholeheartedly read more of his work. However, I can’t help but feel that this book just fell flat, with the unfortunate habit of cutting itself off with new characters and plot lines.

[miss.mesmerized · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Der 16-jährige Jeremy arbeitet bei Video Hut, einer kleinen Videothek in dem Örtchen Nevada in Iowa. Es sind die späten 1990er, die Menschen leihen noch Videos aus, die Zeit der DVD und Streamingdienste kommt erst noch. Die Arbeit ist weder besonders anspruchsvoll noch zukunftsträchtig, aber besser als nichts. Die Abende verbringt er mit seinem Vater; seit seine Mutter starb, sind die zwei ein Team, das gut funktioniert und in Ruhe miteinander auskommt. Eines Tages kommt die Lehrerin Stephanie recht verstört, um ein Leihvideo zurückzubringen. Es sei noch etwas auf der Kassette, das da offenkundig nicht hingehöre. Jeremy will zunächst nichts von der Sache wissen, aber als dies zum zweiten Mal geschieht, schaut er sich die Tapes doch an. Der normale Film wird von kurzen Sequenzen unterbrochen, Szenen, in denen man eine Scheune erkennt und eine Frau, die womöglich misshandelt wird. Jeremy und Stephanie beginnen zu forschen.Die Kurzbeschreibung von John Darnielles Roman klingt nach einem spannenden Thriller, erinnert ein wenig an das Blair Witch Project und verspricht Hochspannung. Bis zum oben geschilderten Moment ist dies auch der Fall. Langsam baut er Autor die Handlung auf, der gottverlassene Ort fernab der Großstädte, ein Jugendlicher mit etwas Neugier und Wagemut und ein mysteriöses Vorkommnis. Spannend geschrieben, passende Zutaten. Doch dann plötzlich scheint ein völlig anderer Text zu beginnen. Darnielle springt in die Vergangenheit und erzählt die Lebensgeschichte einer Frau, die ausbricht aus dem gutbürgerlichen Leben, das man von ihr erwartet. Sie schließt sich einer Sekte an und tauscht ein ungewisses Schicksal gegen die vorsehbare Kleinstadtfamilie. Man ist irritiert, verwundert und ein wenig verärgert. Dank der Schreibkunst des Autors ist dieser Abschnitt kein Deut schlechter geschrieben, aber wo bitte bleibt die Suche nach den Videosequenzen?Teil drei führt uns wieder zurück zu Jeremy und Stephanie, deren Suche langsam bedrohlicher wird und einer vielversprechenden Spur folgt. Allerdings nur so lange bis Teil 4 beginnt und wir wieder eine ganz andere Geschichte bekommen, die in keinem Zusammenhang zu den vorherigen zu stehen scheint. Es erklärt sich zwar, aber mir sind die Brüche hier zu extrem, um noch von einem runden Roman sprechen zu können. Das Handlungsgerüst ist experimentell, um es positiv zu beschreiben. Mich konnte es nicht wirklich überzeugen, ich bin ein Freund von einem roten Faden, der den Leser durch die Geschichte führt. Und ich bevorzuge zudem relativ eindeutige Genrezuordnungen. Dass mitten im Text sowohl Genre wie auch Handlung völlig ausgetauscht werden, hat mich schlichtweg zu sehr irritiert um es mit Begeisterung aufzunehmen. Auch wenn sich am Ende vieles fügt, dies war einfach ein wenig too much. Das ist schade, vor allem vor dem Hintergrund eines wirklich tollen Anfangs, der weiterverfolgt einen herausragenden Thriller ergeben hätte. Fazit: ein toll geschriebener Roman, der leider durch seinen Aufbau eine Chance vertan hat.

[jaredorlando-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

You may know John Darnielle as the front man of the Mountain Goats. What you may not know is that he is not only an author, but he is a great author.

With Universal Harvester, we see Darnielle's unique prosaic style, with a wide vocabulary and avid imagination. Harvester is a weird book, that is for sure, a thriller set in the farmland of Iowa, against the backdrop of a small town. Unexpected turns and a creeping sense of urgency pushes the story along, making it a book better finished in one to two sittings.

[ashles_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

At times Universal Harvester gave me the same (wonderful!) uncanny feeling that House of Leaves did, but the story felt too short, shallow, and disjointed. Disjointed, as if a hobbyist spliced their films into others'. When looking at it that way, it isn't really a flaw to me. I admire what Darnielle attempted to do, but overall the story was flat and all the red herrings got old.

[ridgewaygirl · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Universal Harvester was an odd book that sucked me right into it. John Darnielle has written a sort of horror story about Jeremy, who is working as an assistant manager at a video rental store when a few of the tapes appear with odd and frightening insertions in the middle of the VHS tapes. Looking more closely, the location of these clips is a farmhouse not to far from the small town of Nevada, Iowa. The horror in this book is subtle, and is effective for most of the book. It's a masterclass in creating a feel of rising dread. Whether that creepiness is maintained as the origin of the clips is unveiled is debatable. Universal Harvester does succeed unreservedly in portraying a specific time and place and Darnielle's writing is never gets in the way of the story he's telling.

[rosalita_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I have both not much and too much to say about this one, which ultimately just did not work for me, no matter how much I tried to like it. The story was disjointed and the ending an utter anticlimax. I think it was meant to be a creepy, atmospheric read, but that was continually undercut by Darnielle's writing choices. One chapter ends with the main character, Jeremy, headed off down a lonely Iowa country road to confront some mysterious people who may or may not be making some sort of snuff films; the next chapter opens several days later with Jeremy at home, perfectly fine. So when Darnielle backtracks to show the confrontation at the house, there is absolutely no suspense in it whatsoever because we already know Jeremy survives! Add in a long middle section flashback that added nothing worthwhile in my view and it all adds up to a lousy 2.5 stars for a book that I really wanted to like.

[stahl2ricco · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Nevada, Iowa. 26th best small town in America, according to a photo on Wikipedia. And the setting for this book.The story starts very strong! Creepy images are showing up on videotapes at Video Hut, a rental place. Cool! But by the end of Part One, I was starting to drift. Part Two was a total snoozer. And then, it just totally fell apart. The story felt disjointed, uneven, and lost. I'm not sure what it was even about. I am shocked how quickly this book just fell apart.

[bherner_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is weird and wonderful and You Must Read It! It's like a foreign film - all loose ends and unresolved tension. I just finished it this morning and I'm ready to read it again.

[sturlington_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

If you are of a certain age, you likely remember the video store as a regular stop on the errands run. And if you grew up in a small American town, you may remember the locally owned video store as a peculiar confluence of people and culture in a place where there wasn't a whole lot else to do. I have fond memories of our local video store and the woman who owned it, who always made hilariously bad movie recommendations. I could have worked there one summer as a teen but didn't, and now I wonder if that's the reason I missed out on a writing career.Anyway, this book is not about a video store, although it does begin there. Jeremy is working in a small-town Iowa video store, biding his time while he figures out what to do with his life. A couple of customers returning videotapes remark that extra snippets of film footage have been added to the movies. Jeremy investigates and is thrown off kilter by what he sees. He shows the movies to his boss, who happens to recognize a house glimpsed in a snippet of footage, and she drives there to check it out.You may think you know where this is going. You would be wrong.This little book is exquisitely written, a meditation on many things, including loss, grief, family, small-town life, Midwest culture, and death (perhaps the "universal harvester" of the title, or does that refer to some piece of farm equipment?). It is about all the things in life that we can't really know, and as such, there are a lot of unknowns left for the reader. It is in many ways disturbing, unsettling, off kilter, but it is also meditative and mournful. A short book, it will take very little time to read, but you will be left thinking about it long after you're done.

[angiestahl-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Mehhhh. I was so excited to read this based on reviews and advance buzz. The hook - disturbing splices of home video turning up on random VHS movies at a small town Iowa video rental store - was like catnip. I anticipated both the storyline and approach would be left of mainstream.It's well-written and the author has an empathy, if not affinity, for those in a small town and the different (slower) pace of life in them. I felt like I was transported to small town Iowa (or midwest). Clocking in at under 300 pages, it's written efficiently, but not sparsely. But. This is a 'high concept' book that just didn't land anywhere for me. Overall, I'm not sure what happened or or if nothing did, what I was supposed to feel or whether the author really knew either. In the end, I came away thinking this was a book that got the benefit of the doubt on 'brilliance and substance' simply because it isn't neatly categorizable and no one wants to admit they didn't get it.

[jen6e6moore · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This was excellent - not quite the horror I was expecting it to be, but a brilliant meditation on the things we do when we miss someone. And very creepy, even if not outright horror.

[irregularreader · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book was included in Powell’s Indiespensable #61, and the description was so intriguing that I sat down and started reading it then and there.The book primarily follows Jeremy Heldt, high school grad and video store employee in Nevada, Iowa in the mid 1990s. Life is fairly normal for Jeremy, he lives with his father, the two carrying on quietly after the death of his mother several years ago in a car crash. The peace and quiet is slowly broken apart when a customer comes into the store, saying that her rental “has another movie on it.” When a second customer comes in complaning of te same thing, Jeremy investigates. Playing the movie through, a black and white film, barely a minute long, has been inserted into the middle of the movie. Though there’s nothing concrete in the short film, it is vaguely unsettling. When other films begin appearing in other movies at the store, the creep factor goes up exponentially. Moreover, there are familiar landmarks in the background of these strange, vaguely threatening films . . .I really enjoyed this book. Darnielle has a writing style that manages to be descriptive and stark at the same time. In addition, the book is told from the point of view of a smugly omniscient narrator who seems to delight in keeping bits an pieces back from the reader. We are instead forced to circle around the mystery behind the tapes like a vulture, seeing only the smallest parts at a time. The whole thing reminds me of House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. With that book, it was hard to pin down what exactly was so creepy, but it kept you up at night.Fans of psychological suspense will like this book. It’s a finely creepy sophomore work from an up-and-coming author.

[theloopylibrarian · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Well-written, but strange and unsettling. Not quite sure what to make of it, but it had me under its spell nevertheless.Please note: In accordance with FTC guidelines, I received a free ARC in exchange for an honest review.

[jjbooklvr · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Ever finish a book and then wonder what just happened? That is this book for sure. Lyrical writing that had me stopping to reread certain passages to just savor them. That story though. It will take me time to wrap my head around what actually happened. This is not the book for people who need a clear story with a clean finish. Don't let that stop you. Appreciate the ride and the slow burn. The journey is what matters!

[kcshankd · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Iowa slacker noir. A fascinating story of absence, and unwanted presence. I enjoyed this novel a great deal, and was continuously surprised by its turns.