Life in a small town takes a dark turn when mysterious footage begins
appearing on VHS cassettes at the local Video Hut. So begins
**Universal Harvester, the haunting and masterfully unsettling new
novel from John Darnielle, author of the New York Times Bestseller and
National Book Award Nominee *Wolf in White Van.
A New York Times **Bestseller
A Finalist for the Locus Award (Best Horror Novel)
**
"A moving, beautifully etched picture of America's lost and
profoundly lonely." --Kazuo Ishiguro, author of The Remains of the Day
and winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature
"Brilliant . . . Darnielle is a master at building suspense, and his
writing is propulsive and urgent; it's nearly impossible to stop
reading . . . [Universal Harvester is] beyond worthwhile; it's a
major work by an author who is quickly becoming one of the brightest
stars in American fiction."
--Michael Schaub, Los Angeles Times
"Grows in menace as the pages stack up . . . [But] more sensitive
than one would expect from a more traditional tale of dread." --Joe
Hill, New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice)
"The most unsettling book I've read since House of Leaves."
--Adam Morgan, Electric Literature
It's the late '90s, and you can find Jeremy Heldt at the Video Hut in
Nevada, Iowa--a small town in the center of the state. The job is good
enough for Jeremy, 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 carwreck. But when a local
school teacher comes in to return her copy of *Targets--*an old movie,
starring Boris Karloff--the transaction jolts Jeremy out of his routine.
"There's something on it," she says as she leaves the store, though she
doesn't elaborate. Two days later, another customer returns another
tape, and registers the same odd complaint: "There's another movie on
this tape."
In Universal Harvester, the once-placid Iowa fields and farmhouses
become sinister, imbued with loss and instability and foreboding. As
Jeremy and those around him are absorbed into tapes, they become part of
another story--one that unfolds years into the past and years into the
future, part of an impossible search for something someone once lost
that they would do anything to regain.
