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Mar 27, 2017 Web Exclusive By Frank Valish

John Darnielle, singer and songwriter for indie darlings The Mountain Goats, moonlights as a novelist, and Universal Harvester is his second book, following 2014’s excellent Wolf in White Van. In Universal Harvester, Darnielle follows Jeremy Heldt, a video clerk from a broken home (Jeremy’s mother died in a car accident years prior). Heldt’s life goes from monotonous to chilling when he stumbles upon the fact that a couple of his store’s movies have inexplicable mysterious homemade footage spliced into the film’s content. As the story unravels, the mysterious becomes mysterious-er, leading Heldt to a barn outside of town. The story flashes back to that of Lisa Sample, a girl whose mother seemingly runs away to join a cult, and forward past Heldt’s story to a family that finds an abandoned carload of similarly overdubbed movies on a newly purchased property. As the layers are peeled back, Darnielle leave the reader to connect the dots in a story that encompasses family, memory, legacy, and a curiosity of behavior that never truly gets explained. It’s a haunting story that will truly get under your skin. (www.fsgbooks.com)

Author rating: 7.5/10