UNIVERSAL HARVESTER

"Orlok, like the actor [Boris Karloff], is a surviving remnant of a bygone age; the monsters he played when he was younger and stronger have given way to the ongoing shocks of the late twentieth century, to atrocities of war and the isolation of modern life. There are new monsters now."

—page 20, Universal Harverster by John Darnielle

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John Darnielle is the singer-songwriter responsible for the band The Mountain Goats, and for most of it's musical history as the solo member. Now, Mr. Darnielle is also an author and Universal Harvester is his second novel.

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I went in with no expectations of what to find within these pages.

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The little I did know was that the main character was a twenty-something clerk in a mom-and-pop video store in Nevada, Iowas in those moments where videotape rentals were on the decline. The story takes place in the late 1990s. My experience as a teenage clerk in a mom-and-pop video store took place a decade earlier, but I found much here that was familiar.

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It doesn't take long for the familiar to give way to the strange, though. Small snippets of home video (?) are being reported by customers in the middle of movies they've rented. But how did these scenes get there?

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A reading note:

There is a slow build of creeping horror (and I'm only to page 42 (of 214)). This is Lovecraftian. Or Poe. Or The Blair Witch Project.

It shouldn't be as tense as it is at this point, mostly because so little has happened.

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And then:

Darnielle makes sure that he knows that you were going to refer to The Blair Witch Project at some point...

"'I don't know if either of you saw that Blair With Project but they had something like this on the internet.' Both nodded back." (page 76)

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There is more than one story line and they eventually melt together. The tension builds and then is left as we enter a new story line. The pattern starts again. But there is connective tissue to attach one story to another to another.

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This isn't cosmic horror (a la Lovecraft) after all, but, indeed, the new monster of "the isolation of modern life." The antidote in these tales is people having to deal with one another face to face, in the flesh.

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Recommended if you like literary fiction or "cerebral" horror.