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Not surprisingly, like a
lot of John Darnielle’s music, particularly those songs on the album The Sunset
Tree (Pale Green Things springs to
mind and is very much worth listening to), his writing only slowly reveals itself
and its narrative direction. Not in any turgid or tedious fashion, but rather
in an unhurried, gentler and more thoughtful way. Universal Harvester rolls
gently along its path with only a few disconcerting and probably deliberate
hiccups. It starts in Iowa in the 1990s with a young man, still living at home
with his father but unable to leave because of the weight of his mother’s
death, years before, in a car crash. The trauma tethers Jeremy and his father
together like the gravitational pull of a dead star in a comfortable and
predictable but numb orbit, but it’s never something that either of them can
discuss openly.
Jeremy works at a VHS
rental store, so we’re assuredly early-Worldwide Web era. His job is simple,
repetitive, and keeps him and his father in entertainment of an evening, when
they share a few cans of weak beer - ‘Beasts’ - and watch movies. Thus far the
narrative exists in a fug of small-town Iowan isolation, shot through with a
sense of loss and dereliction. However, the first hiccup arrives and pushes
this lost, post-industrial agricultural scene into something resembling the
infamous Koki Suzuki Ring horror series.
Customers start noticing disturbing and unexplained cuts in the movies they’re renting.
Short scenes of stillness or bizarre dancing in barns or disused farmhouses, unnamed
people squirming beneath sacking, a girl running down a dark road –Jeremy’s
interest is peaked and he sets out to explore the meaning of it all. This could
have set in motion some sort of American Gothic Horror novel but it hiccups
again, and then there’s a story of another lost mother, and another car crash.
Dad finds a girl, Jeremy finds a new job, and it turns an oblique corner into
something else again.
It all feels a bit wintery
Americana in some respects, but with a lot of the chill coming off the very
weird vibes of the mystery video clips. It’s a moving novel for all of that,
and the mystery, although not quite satisfyingly resolved, draws the reader on
through the tired agricultural landscape of small-town middle America and the
middle American lives it encompasses. It feels something of an anachronism to
be reading “Be Kind, Rewind” again, more Psychedelic Furs than Mountain Goats, and
a little uncomfortably Tarantino-esque to be lost in nostalgia for the 1990s,
but in the end that’s not what this is about; it’s simply a mode of conveying something
of the liminal physical and emotional spaces around our lives.
I didn’t know then whether I
seriously liked this novel or if I was beholden to a strange sense of loyalty,
given I enjoy most of Darnielle’s music and do occasionally foist him onto
friends, colleagues, and strangers, but in retrospect, and with a good distance from which
to consider it objectively, I know now that I do. It’s a creeper, a grower, and
its slow reveal is even now ongoing.
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