Trying to make a name for yourself as a writer after you have already made one for yourself as a musician, or really any other type of artistic endeavor, must be a hard thing to do, and not because of the work involved. It has been done before, with people as varied as Thomas Tyron and Willy Vlautin coming to my mind immediately as being successful. Now, add to that shortlist John Darnielle, mostly known for his accomplishments in the music world as the lead singer and songwriter of the band The Mountain Goats, whose few songs I have heard are fantastic. And so is his second novel, Universal Harvester. While it can sometimes fail at making any kind of sense, especially towards the end, this is a confident book, one that tries its hardest to be original and self-contained with nary a hint of painful self-awareness or an uncomfortable sense of an artist out of their element. This is a creepy story set in a small town in Iowa. It focuses on Jeremy, a young man still reeling from his mother’s death who works a day job at the Video Hut. Soon, people start returning videotapes with complaints that another movie is spliced into the one they rented. Jeremy soon watches these “defective” tapes and finds disturbing scenes of a malevolent nature and pulls in his troubled boss, Sarah Jane and his old teacher Stephanie into this strange web, which has its roots in the near past and an old farmhouse at the edge of town. This reads like a second-rate Dan Chaon novel: it’s a suburban gothic of the highest order, with creepy scenes of menace and an overall feeling of disquiet that permeates the pages, but it doesn’t all piece together. That would be okay if the mystery at the heart of the book wasn’t begging for more inference or clarity, especially its last 50 or so pages, which introduce a new thread that is cut off at the end just as things are making sense. Still, this swell, brilliantly out-there novel by one of the best musician turned writers around.
Rating: 4/5
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