And what does it say about the country?
The Thread Must-Read
"Universal Harvester"by John Darnielle
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I first heard about John Darnielle as a musician — not an author. He’s the man behind the cult band The Mountain Goats, and their bizarre, shout-singing narrative songs. But he doesn’t just write melancholy music. His first book, “Wolf in the Van,” was nominated for the 2014 National Book Award. It dealt with two lonely teenagers and a role-playing game gone awry.
His newest novel dumps readers into the isolation of Iowa cornfields, in the town of Nevada. (That’s Nuh-vay-duh, to locals.) Jeremy is young, in his early 20s, but his life has already slid to a slow crawl: He works at the local video rental store and lives with his dad, who is constantly trying to get him to take a better job. Every day blends into the next.
Then a customer returns a VHS copy of “She’s All That” and tells him there’s something wrong with it. In the middle of the high school comedy, someone has interspersed disturbing scenes of a dark barn. It’s hard to make out what’s happening, exactly. There’s only the sound of breathing, and a figure seated in — maybe tied to — a chair. The tape abruptly cuts right back to the rom-com sunshine of the movie.
More altered tapes start to show up at the Video Hut. More random scenes of something happening in the dark — a woman running, the camera tilting. Jeremy, the customer and his boss begin to look into who could be editing the scenes, and what the footage shows. Their searches lead them to a farmhouse owned by a woman who lost her mother to a religious cult decades before.
Darnielle weaves a tangled, unsettling mystery that confronts death and the loneliness of small towns, the power of memory and the need for connection. As someone who grew up steeped in the tales of haunted video tapes (thanks a lot, “The Ring”), I tore through this new, thoughtful spin on horror at the video store.
-Tracy Mumford
P.S. Tell us what you're reading on Twitter @TheThreadMPR.
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