3 out of 5 stars
John Darnielle is often busy writing albums about adolescent metal bands in the midwest, the last noble masked wrestlers, and his abusive stepfather to pad out his already 16-album-long discography (and that’s not including EPs, cassette exclusives, demos, and collaborative projects).
He is often busy being a husband and father of two.
He was once busy being a psychiatric nurse, and is now busy being a social activist for organizations such as Planned Parenthood and Farm Sanctuary.
Somehow, in the midst of all this, Darnielle has found time to publish two full-length, critically acclaimed novels.
Universal Harvester, his sophomore novel, comes just three years after the publication of his first work, Wolf in White Van. Like its predecessor, Universal Harvester delves into the foggy past, but this time, Darnielle takes the familiar and adjusts the television’s bunny-ears to render the world uncanny.
It is a text that benefits from the metaphor of literal film, creating exposition on memory, on grief, and on time.
The success of Universal Harvester hinges entirely upon Darnielle’s almost unrivalled ability to tell a story—be it with a guitar or with a pen.
Here is an individual who has spent his entire adult life creating wonderful, heartbreaking, and overall relatable stories delicately folded into three-minute-long overtures. In Universal Harvester Darnielle hands his reader a paper crane with perfect folds and stark creases in immaculate shape.
As we turn the pages of Universal Harvester, he asks that we slowly, angle by angle, unfold his creation. Rather than slowly reveal its design, Darnielle’s text somehow becomes larger, more complicated, and assumes a much more insipidly terrifying shape than we’d imagined.
Universal Harvester follows 22-year-old video store clerk Jeremy Heldt, who, upon receiving several complaints about movies being taped over with short, eerie clips, launches an investigation throughout his small town of Nevada, Iowa.
The tapes themselves appear to be chosen by an innocuous hand. Several Nevada locals return both old and newly released VHS tapes, but note to Jeremy that, somehow, someone has managed to tape over a section of the film (taping over commercially-released VHS tapes was supposed to be impossible).
The imposed clips aren’t accidental wedding videos, or home videos of children playing in a backyard, but something much more sinister.
In one, a hooded figure stands on one foot in a dark corner of a barn while from behind the camera heavy breathing rhythmically muffles over the camera’s mic. In another, figures writhe beneath a tarp on the floor of the barn for some minutes before cutting off.
Unfortunately, despite its intriguing and stygian premise, Darnielle’s novel fails to deliver a story of great depth. It is a novel that spends pages upon pages building atmosphere, providing literary jumpscares and heebie-jeebies, but can’t seem to reveal the big bad omnipresent darkness in a satisfying way.
Darnielle’s characters lack ambition and agency. They navigate around one another in cautious choreography and carefully avoid transgressions and trespassing. Perhaps the fault lies in the novel’s actualization as a slow, seeping meditation on grief rather than a building, tension-filled horror novel a la Stephen King.
Universal Harvester’s antagonist isn’t evil, or darkness, or human malevolence, but instead inaction and loss. This is typified in Jeremy’s relationship with his father, which, since his mother’s death six years earlier, has stagnated into one of routines and emotionless dinners and movies.
Universal Harvester isn’t what you’re made to expect in the opening movements of the text. It becomes a smaller, sadder story. Something about grief, maybe. Survival, sure. It tells us that whatever truth you may be trying to howl out to the world could be forgotten, or left behind, or ignored.
Photo by Mariah Bridgeman/The Ontarion.