A Book A Week

It’s the 1990s, and video rental stores are king. In a small Iowa town, the mom-and-pop Video Hut holds its own against the threat of a shiny new Hollywood Video in the next city over. For Jeremy, who mans the counter, it’s not a bad gig. It's steady enough business to keep the lights on, and the owner, Sarah Jane, lets him watch as many movies as he wants. Things change when a customer returns a VHS of Targets, an old Boris Karloff film, claiming “something’s on it.” Jeremy dismisses it at first. After all, old tapes tend to wear out over time. But when another customer reports a similar issue on a copy of She’s All That, curiosity wins out.

In the middle of the rom-com, the screen briefly cuts to black before flickering into a black-and-white scene: a barn, a camera left running, the faint sound of someone breathing. Four minutes later, the movie resumes. Disturbed but transfixed, Jeremy rewinds and watches the clip repeatedly. The footage on Targets is similar—grainy, unsettling, and clearly made by the same hand. Worse, the barn looks awfully familiar, like one just outside town. Jeremy wants nothing to do with it, but once Sarah Jane sees the tapes, she urges him to dig deeper. For Jeremy and those around him, life in their quiet town will never be the same.

I have to admit, I’m still not sure I can make complete sense of John Darnielle’s Universal Harvester. The premise suggests a kind of found-footage horror story, but that’s not quite what the novel delivers. In fact, part of me felt a little betrayed by the summary. It wasn’t the story I expected going in. And yet, I tore through the book in just a couple of sittings, completely absorbed by Darnielle’s prose and the richly drawn characters he conjures. The question, of course, is to what end? Is this a nostalgic meditation, a story about grief, a slow-burning mystery laced with unease? Maybe it’s all three. Or maybe it’s none of them. In the end, Universal Harvester resists easy categorization, leaving readers to decide for themselves what it ultimately means. I guess some stories aren’t meant to resolve neatly. Some exist to make you question, haunting your thoughts long after you’ve closed the book.

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(2025, 77)