Universal Harvester

by John Darnielle

Spoilers follow. This starts out feeling like a horror story, and it has that category on the copyright page. Yet even though you spend the first half of the book expecting to meet a serial killer at any moment, no one dies, and the story is ultimately about mothers and fathers, loss, and trying to heal your own wounds. The end of the book was very moving, not so much because of what happened in the book but because of what it made me think about in my own life.

Jeremy works at a video store in Iowa in the 90s. Someone is splicing in weird home movie footage into the videos. The footage is fragmentary but gives them impression that people are being kidnapped, interrogated, etc. The video store owner (Sarah Jane) eventually tracks down the lady who’s doing it (Lisa), and they become close, with Sarah Jane even moving out to Lisa’s property for a while.

In Part 2, you get the background story on Lisa, how her mom fell in with a charismatic, homeless-seeming religious leader named Michael Christopher, and followed him away from her family. Lisa’s dad was never able to find her, and they never saw or heard anything else from her, other than a short note she sent to her parents.

Lisa makes these tapes as a way of connecting with her mom and somehow telling her mom’s life story. That doesn’t make much sense when I blurt it out here, but it makes some sense in the context of the book. It’s hard to explain.