REVIEW | ‘Universal Harvester’

‘Universal Harvester” reads like a horror novel, but the monsters at the center are grief and loss. John Darnielle invites his readers to small-town Iowa to plumb the depths of sorrow and the places where it might lead.

The novel opens with Jeremy, who lost his mother at a young age and lives with his father. In his capacity as a Video Hut employee in Nevada, Iowa, he discovers that many of the store's videocassettes have had disquieting scenes spliced into them. Reluctantly, he sets out to discover the source and finds himself more deeply involved than he intends.

Darnielle employs a narrator whose identity is a mystery for much of the book. The narrator unspools three connected storylines, dropping in the occasional vague but ominous comment that keeps the reader on edge.

The narrator also offers various counter-narratives, a device that highlights the tenuousness of the central story being told. The device first appears just a few pages into the book:

'In some version of this story, there's an argument here, because Jeremy feels like his father is being nosy, and because he feels ashamed of being twenty-two years old and not having made anything of himself yet; he's resentful when something reminds him about it ... In some other versions Jeremy stays awake for a couple of hours, maybe watching another movie ... and in the morning he tells his father to write down some of those job listings... In this version he keeps his job at the Video Hut, and then something else happens.

In the book's acknowledgments, Darnielle writes, 'This is a book largely about mothers,” and that's true to some degree. But 'Universal Harvester” might more rightly be said to be a book about the monstrous power of sadness and our desire to understand and overcome it - or at least to ameliorate it for ourselves and others.