...[a] brilliant second novel ... What appears to be a chilling horror tale is also a perfectly rendered story about family and loss ... The two threads of the story come together in a truly scary climax, and it wouldn’t be fair to spoil any of it. Darnielle is a master at building suspense, and his writing is propulsive and urgent; it’s nearly impossible to stop reading. He’s also incredibly gifted at depicting the dark side of the rural Midwest ... Suspense and ambience count for only so much, though; a horror novel (or any kind of novel) works only with believable characters. And every one in Universal Harvester is realistic, especially Jeremy, who finds himself torn between staying at the video store and leaving it behind for more lucrative work ... So while it’s genuinely unsettling, it’s also a heartfelt reflection on family, as well as a kind of love letter to the often overlooked towns of the American Midwest ... Darnielle’s novel is beyond worthwhile; it’s a major work by an author who is quickly becoming one of the brightest stars in American fiction.
John Darnielle’s second novel, Universal Harvester, very much fits the contemporary puzzle-box aesthetic. In other respects, it is strikingly and enchantingly out of time ... Darnielle has subtle fun teasing out the reader’s assumptions as to what kind of novel Universal Harvester might turn out to be. The opening chapters’ autumnal mood of studiedly low-key smalltown ennui and bereavement suggest one kind of story. The 'cursed movie' trope portends a turn towards the horror or gothic mystery genre. But Darnielle’s narrative cuts an oblique channel through all these expectations ... In the end, and for all its narrative leaps and disquieting gestures toward genre, the novel makes most sense as a piece of regional portraiture, an eerie but lovingly detailed delineation of a landscape that, like all landscapes, is part external reality and part memory ... Though set less than a quarter of a century ago, at its uncanniest and most affecting, Universal Harvester feels like a document from a civilisation that vanished aeons ago.
...like a gentle, Midwestern riff on David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (maybe with a pinch of Fargo thrown in for good measure). If it were a video, you might find it in the horror aisle, dropped there by a pimply clerk unsure where else to put it ... but ultimately the novel doesn’t belong in the horror aisle. I couldn’t tell you where it ought to be filed, and maybe that’s O.K. Darnielle’s aims are finally sweeter, quieter and more sensitive than one would expect from a more traditional tale of dread. He writes with the simple clarity of a young adult novelist, effortlessly sketching modest lives in the green, empty expanses of the heartland. Much of what seems, at first, to be merely skillful ornament — descriptions of desolate barns and scouring winds — turns out to be at the very center of the story itself. Grief is a landscape, Darnielle seems to imply, that is so often explored alone, and where shelter is hard to find.
With a such a haunting premise established, a reader might be forgiven for imagining the direction of the rest of the story: more altered videos show up, doling out more disturbing imagery, with a few clues to their origin interspersed; the protagonists are drawn into a dark conspiracy, or an all-too-human horror show. But Darnielle’s book is full of surprises and, without revealing too much, let it be said that the story subverts these expectations ... Universal Harvester frequently explores the way stories are told, and especially their relationship to trauma and fantasy—an important theme in Wolf in White Van as well. It is unfortunate, then, that Universal Harvester is never quite as compelling as that book. The mystery of who is splicing the footage into the video and why is left to lie fallow for long stretches of time, though it’s never entirely abandoned. This is not to say that the story is ultimately unsatisfying, but rather that the premise and the tone of the novel often seem at odds with each other ... Still, I admire the risk Darnielle takes in splicing together these disparate elements. Structurally, the book resembles the videos at its center, with trauma irrupting in surprising places. The characters do their best to cope with it through fantasy and denial, and occasionally by facing it head-on.
Like Jeremy, many of Universal Harvester’s characters suffer from an extreme passivity, too scared of seeming rude or overstepping to act, and the story, unfortunately, suffers for it, too ... Darnielle often justifies his characters’ actions more generally, too, instead of letting readers perform their own interpretations, the prose becoming clotted with such exposition ... Yet the novel also holds welcome surprises. Early on, the third-person narration is interrupted by an unexplained first-person voice, spliced into the prose like the black-and-white snippets found on Video Hut’s commercial movies. Other delightfully creepy moments occur ... Action that would best be rendered as complete scenes is often summarized, its power never fully realized on the page. Like Darnielle’s first novel, 2014’s Wolf In White Van, Harvester stumbles in its execution of an intriguing, nay fascinating, premise. As in his songwriting, here Darnielle displays a big heart and a strong sense of place; with some refining on the page, those things could really sing.
Darnielle's prose is lucid and precise, the sort of clear-eyed, knife-jab sentences that defined both his debut Wolf in White Van and his whole songwriting career. He moves through the plot with an enviable looseness ... in its own way, a fairy tale — an old, un-Disney-fied one — filtered through the fragrant, dusty Iowan air; a ghost story that's all too real; a detective story with no simple solution ... The novel strikes at the heart of the realities of small-town existence — not just their downsides, which would have been a cheap and easy shot, but their pleasures and comforts and truths. In White Van, Darnielle wound around a single act of violence like water orbiting a drain. But here, the violence is larger, more existential, more terrifying. It is not a single a moment that changes everything, but instead a culmination of choices, tempered by the ordinary details of daily life.
A few chapters into Universal Harvester, you might be forgiven for thinking you were reading an unusually artful novelization of some forgotten X-Files episode ... Darnielle’s novel ultimately proves itself to be an exploration of—if not quite a meditation on—the experience of loss writ large. Though Universal Harvester sometimes teases true horror, that promised menace never quite materializes. Instead, Darnielle’s novel belongs to what might be called the literature of disquiet, a sentiment that emerges as much from his syntax as from the content of his story ... In time, a pattern begins to emerge from these stoicisms, one that tells a quiet story about our estrangement from familiar people, places, and things ... If Universal Harvester is ultimately a horror novel at all, as it initially seems to be, it is one in which the only monster is the deep well of our shared sadness.
By page 60, I was freaked out enough to take a break. Such is the power of John Darnielle’s writing ... The best thing about good horror like this, though, is that Darnielle makes you care about these people. They are good people. You don’t want to see them getting hurt by the darkness at the edge of the story, but there it is, creeping in and popping out at them during videos they’ve rented, invading the privacy of their own living rooms, catching them when they were safe at home ... Universal Harvester is not a typically scary book, but the horror, when it comes, is all the worse because it will touch all of us reading this book, and we’ll all have to struggle to keep our humanity in its face.
Channeling Raymond Carver and Stephen King, and tapping into the unsettling doom of 1990s shows like Twin Peaks and widespread Y2K hysteria, Universal Harvester reads like a melancholic, at times creepy, tone poem ... To be sure, Darnielle isn’t plotting some clunky whodunit. Each section of the four-part book offers another overlapping puzzle piece, but he subverts our expectations for the genre at every turn ... The narrative suffers from a kind of attention-deficit disorder ... If this point of view jiujitsu is distracting, the riddle of each character’s inner life keeps our attention. Like Wolf in White Van, whose protagonist constructs a fantasy role-playing game for emotional survival, Universal Harvester characters are dogged by their emotional limits ... As the fractured story line crumbles, Universal Harvester contents itself to sing this haunting, lyrical, interior-minded ode to the stoic souls of Iowa farm towns.
Darnielle draws together lyrical diction and carefully timed doubt to build tension on every page. He leads Jeremy on a hunt for the tapes’ meaning, and parallels Jeremy’s story with a much older one about another character who has also lost her mother ... Darnielle’s non-linear timeline mirrors the broken tapes; ambiguity is wielded so artfully, it might as well be the secondary setting ... Darnielle thankfully avoids overwriting and spoiling the beautiful confusion until he draws it to a satisfying end ... Universal Harvester is a story about the children that mothers leave behind. It’s about generational dissonance, about the futility of any method of record keeping or art to preserve history or truth. Darnielle paints a haunting picture as notable for its blank spaces as its thrilling detail.
The Iowa Darnielle brings us to is a vast, unchanging place that can be both comforting and suffocating. His prose, honed over decades of songwriting for the Mountain Goats, is perfectly suited to this kind of story. In song, he distills entire lives into evocative three-minute scenes of caustic wit and painful tenderness. His fiction writing drops water onto that brittle sponge, expanding his signature voice in a way that's relaxed and infinitely readable ... The longer he teases out the mystery this way, meandering through these hypotheticals and the insignificant details of characters' memories, the more the creepy footage feels like a bait-and-switch, imported from a different, tighter book to make this one more immediately jarring. As the final section rushes abruptly toward, and then through, an explanation, the careful simplicity of the preceding chapters shatters, without much impact ... What Darnielle delivers instead is an unsettling, almost terrifying truth: that we can never fully understand the people around us, and by the time we realize they need saving, it may already be too late.
Universal Harvester reads similarly to his first book in many ways, marrying gothic mystery to a more modern literary style, employing a non-linear narrative with frequent switchbacks and detours. However, where Wolf in White Van shines, Mr. Darnielle’s second book feels like a failed genre experiment ... But Mr. Darnielle’s vision is never fully realized. The spaces go mostly unfilled, and the suspense is always more potential than actual. It all feels a little hollow. Mr. Darnielle relies too much on the innovations of its genre-mixing without seeming to really understand what those genres require. Much of the book’s forward momentum hinges on figuring out the puzzle of who is making these tapes, and why. But the author lingers over the characters and settings so ponderously, that by the time we understand what’s happening, this puzzle no longer seems to matter. Universal Harvester is well-written, though structurally unsound. It’s impossible to deny John Darnielle’s talent, but his execution is lacking here.
Early on, Universal Harvester’s setup can’t help but recall a few other things: the haunted VHS from The Ring, the titular film at the heart of Infinite Jest, the small-town horror of Lee Child’s Make Me. But Darnielle digs deeper and stranger—he isn’t interested in what’s on the tapes so much as how the tapes affect those who watch them ... The book’s constant, though, is the same thing that makes Darnielle’s songs with the Mountain Goats so goddamn great: He has an incredible efficiency and skill with words, subtly eliciting a slew of reactions—heartache, fear, the emptiness of half-healed grief—in a few quick lines ... Darnielle feels some stories are best left untold. Not all of Universal Harvester’s questions are answered. The answers that do come are rarely the kind that satisfy. But answers aren’t the point. Despite taking a few cues from mysteries, Universal Harvester isn’t about unraveling plot. It’s about tracing the history and scars of people, of families, of farms and towns.
Universal Harvester taps into [a] potent mix of apprehension and nostalgia ... The book relies on movie tropes as often as novelistic ones—you can picture even the smallest moment as an unfolding montage, like when Darnielle compares the sight of cornfields through a speeding car's window to 'stock footage.' The midwestern town he's crafted, and its panoramic pastoral landscape, seems wooden and slightly overlit, like an old-fashioned film set ... Like Don DeLillo, Darnielle is able to precisely describe the character of an object in the world ... One of the novel's disappointments is that Darnielle never manages to convincingly conjure the giddy excitement of this era's VHS B movies, a lapse that is particularly galling when he describes the mystery footage at the heart of the novel. In the end, the book's driving evil is annoyingly vague.
Few books in recent memory have mastered the Midwestern uncanny as well as John Darnielle’s strange and lyrical Universal Harvester ... the book defies expectations. Instead of unfolding as a gothic thriller brimming with mystery-solving and monster-dodging, it becomes something far stranger ... The book becomes, in part, a meditation on grief and healing and a young man’s need to find his footing in a world of limited opportunity ... It’s also gorgeously written. Via the Mountain Goats, Darnielle is known for poetic songwriting, a talent parlayed into elegiac descriptions of the Midwestern landscape ... By both celebrating and lamenting the harshness of the Midwest, Darnielle reveals why it allures as much as it repels. The deeply moving Universal Harvester, with its genre-eschewing structure and ambiguity, may prove to be equally divisive.
