Play it again
Horror novels are often about the anticipation of the terrifying, rather than its aftermath. After much foreshadowing, the monster, ghost or serial killer finally arrives, is confronted, fails or prevails in its mission. There might be an epilogue that recounts the ultimate fates of the survivors, if any.
What many tales of terror touch only tangentially or omit entirely is grief. Deep loss is a difficult emotion to maintain across many pages and chapters, sometimes making readers too uncomfortable to proceed. Novels of the supernatural that do place grief ’s corrosive effects front and center in their narratives include “Lisey’s Story” by Stephen King and Peter Straub’s “Lost Boy, Lost Girl.” With “Universal Harvester,” John Darnielle, author of “Wolf in White Van,” joins them in exploring how grief can mix with sorrow, fear and obsession.
It’s the late 1990s, in the waning days of VHS, and Jeremy Heldt, haunted by the traffic-accident death of his mother, works as a clerk at the Video Hut in small-town Nevada, Iowa. One night, schoolteacher Stephanie Parsons arrives with a tape of “Targets,” the Peter Bogdanovich-directed sniper thriller. Stephanie tells Jeremy, “There’s something on it.”
What she means is that this cassette of “Targets” contains two scenes not on the original print. One of them is a short shot of a chair in the corner of an outbuilding. The second, longer set-up returns to the chair, now occupied by a hooded figure who rises to balance on one foot. The camera operator approaches with a paintbrush and daubs a grotesque face on the canvas hood. The scenes are both banal and weird, creepy but not depicting anything truly alarming or warranting a call to the police.
Jeremy, fellow clerk Ezra and Video Hut owner Sarah Jane Shepherd begin to find more altered tapes. Although it shouldn’t be possible, someone is splicing homemade footage into copies of “Tango & Cash,” “Mortal Thoughts” and other middling entertainments of the era. The more tapes they watch, the more clues the Video Hut gang discovers as to the location of the footage’s farmhouse setting. As ordained by pulp fiction convention, one of them travels alone to the farmhouse to solve the mystery and see if anyone is in need of help.
A composer, musician and lyricist for the band the Mountain Goats, Darnielle clearly has an ear fine-tuned for workaday dialogue. His descriptions of life in rural Iowa and its environs are keenly observed, frequently funny but never condescending.
Scenes between Jeremy and his loving father also resonate with authenticity, as when they sit down to watch a video together: “Jeremy considered himself a little more highminded than his dad, but they both disappeared into the screen glow at about the same time, and they stayed lost once they got there. The room filled with light. It was a space they could share, something to be grateful for without having to think too much about it.”
Darnielle conveys a fondness for late 20th century horror entertainment. He namechecks the found-footage classic “The Blair Witch Project” and even gives a nod to “Burnt Offerings,” an amusingly obscure haunted house movie starring Bette Davis.
“Universal Harvester,” however, offers far more than cheap scares and unlikely pop culture references. It’s a study in obsession, with at least three categories of characters consumed by the tapes: the people who watch them, those who made them and those involved in the events that inspired them.
Darnielle structures the novel so that the narrative moves away from Jeremy for a while, to spotlight Lisa Sample, another character with a missing mother, one who may have left voluntarily. Lisa’s response to childhood trauma is different from Jeremy’s, but there’s no denying the emotional kinship.
The mysterious narrator of the book says: “The mechanism that allowed Lisa Sample to keep her head above water in the wake of her mother’s departure has not been described or cataloged by scientists. It’s efficient, and flexible, and probably transferable from one person to another should they catch the scent on each other. But the rest of the details about it aren’t observable from the outside. You have to be closer than you really want to get to see how it works.”
Darnielle dares to get in close, but in unexpected ways. He depicts grief from oblique angles. For the most part, the characters don’t break down and sob. Rather, they find themselves drawn into situations that look ordinary but gradually prove anything but. When the trauma passes, they wonder who has been hurt. One outside observer says, “He’s fine; they’re all fine,” but the reader knows that’s not the truth.
For all its specificity regarding small-town Midwestern ways, “Universal Harvester” plays it cagey when it comes to providing definitive answers to the questions it raises about the tapes’ meaning. But by withholding explanations, Darnielle ups the level of disquiet. The familiar is imbued with foreboding. Not since Stephen King’s short story “Children of the Corn” has a planted field seemed so ominous.
The title of “Universal Harvester” could simply be a brand of farm equipment. Or it could refer to the Grim Reaper who comes to cut us all down. Either way, it perfectly suits this slim but powerful novel of grief, abandonment, obsession and compulsion.
Michael Berry writes the science fiction and fantasy column for The San Francisco Chronicle. Email: books@sfchronicle.com