![]() ![]() Universal Harvester tells its story with the tools of found footage. ![]() Sarah thinks she recognizes the farmhouse. Jeremy, his boss Sarah Jane, and their customer and enthusiastic investigator Stephanie (a teacher who maybe finds small-town Iowa a little boring after the University of Chicago) play back the tapes and see short, inexplicable flashes: the inside of a shed, people wearing canvas sacks over their heads, a woman fleeing a farm. Customers are coming in perturbed they report uncomfortably strange scenes spliced into their copies of Targets and She’s All That. Universal Harvester starts with Jeremy Heidt, a video rental clerk in Nevada, Iowa, in the 1990s. This essay will still be here when you’re done.) But I so rarely go into a novel not even knowing what kind of story it’s telling, and that feeling of discovery is amazing, so if this novel sounds interesting just go read it. ![]() (I almost don’t want to say that much… I don’t usually worry about spoilers here I’m writing responses to books, not the kind of book reviews you’d read beforehand to gauge your interest. And though it draws from the horror-fiction end of the genre more than the Borgesian, there’s nothing horrific about it it is, instead, gentle and compassionate. It has the story-shape and uncanny affect of weird fiction despite not, in the end, containing anything weird. ![]() Take John Darnielle’s Universal Harvester. Sometimes a book clearly does not belong to a genre, but works so much like that genre it seems to belong in spirit. ![]()
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