This diminishes the intensity of the early phases of the novel: what once appeared to be a clue from a 90s-style horror-thriller is revealed to be something far more human - strange, sure, but certainly not the work of a serial killer. Unfortunately, Darnielle takes an odd turn and reveals outright the tape-editor’s identity as one Lisa Sample, and spends an entire section of the novel tracing her childhood and the events that shaped her curious adult behavior. Although some genuine frights would make Universal Harvester a more exciting read, Darnielle’s careful control of these spliced scenes is quietly effective: the reader and protagonist cannot look for clues without considering who made these tapes and what they were looking to find in their creation. Another video shows what appears to be CC-TV security footage, almost as if the filmmaker was looking for something. One clip depicts a hooded figure who may have been kidnapped, sitting in a familiar-looking barn. He couples the small-town charm of a place where everyone knows everyone with a secret that nobody knows: Jeremy shares his discovery with a friend, his boss Sarah Jane, and his father, each of whom find themselves captivated in turn by these strange spliced scenes.

The first half of the novel does exactly that: Darnielle deftly builds a fog of dread throughout the town of Nevada, Iowa (the first “a” in Nevada is long, as in the word “quaint”).

When video clerk Jeremy learns of a haunting blip of footage spliced into some of his rentals, we wouldn’t think of Ringu, or its American remake, or Infinite Jest and its international terrorism by way of a fatal VHS, but simply that Jeremy was in for a world of trouble and we’d buckle down for some scares. If we encountered Universal Harvester in the late nineties in which it’s set, when Reindeer Games and She’s All That rested proudly on the New Releases shelf of the local Video Hut, there would not have been an easy way for us to see Darnielle’s story through the reflections of others. There was no Google to spell out all the hidden references of a nuanced story, flag something as derivative, or validate any truth a time before DVDs, blu-rays, and, long before all the information in the world was harvested and networked. There was a time once of a limited cultural wheelhouse that confined a person’s touchstones only to the stories they’ve personally encountered or traded, when a hook-hand was a fresh idea if you hadn’t heard it already. John Darnielle’s new novel Universal Harvester is an urban legend - a convoluted and ultimately disappointing one, but enough of a creepy modern folktale to appeal to those readers sensitive to nostalgic storytelling.

Universal harvester novel