She says, with characteristic Iowa economy, “There’s something on this one.” Taking it home, Jeremy watches it and sees that she’s right murky black and white footage has been inserted into the released movie, scenes that keep Jeremy awake at night.įrom there, Universal Harvester traverses time and space to weave together the lives of strangers and acquaintances thrown together into uncomfortable intimacy. It opens with the Jeremy Heldt, a video store clerk in Nevada, Iowa, who is tipped off to the book’s central mystery by customer Stephanie Parsons when she returns a video of Targets, a 1968 Peter Bogdanovich movie. Darnielle will read from his new book Feb. John Darnielle performs with the Mountain Goats at the Englert Theatre on Monday, Sept 26, 2016. The novel is built out of closely observed narratives of life in Iowa that overlap, obscure and reveal each other. John Darnielle’s novel Universal Harvester is also a palimpsest, focused on lives of Iowans and on retrieving the past from found fragments out of context. The Palimpsest was also the name of the magazine published by the Iowa Historical Society from 1920 to 1996, after which it became Iowa Heritage Illustrated, ironically erasing a title that means to erase and overwrite. Scholars of the first millennium focus on recovering the erased text, which can tell a story more interesting than the surface writing. 27 at 7 p.m.Ī palimpsest is a piece of parchment that has been written on, scrubbed clean and written on again. Creepy and poignant by turns, Universal Harvester is a deep dive into damaged lives and the different ways people try to escape grief, loss, and darkness.Prairie Lights - Monday, Feb. As the once-peaceful fields and barns surrounding Nevada begin to seem sinister and threatening, Jeremy must come to terms with a truth that is as devastatingly sad as it is shocking. And what he sees on the videos is so strange and disturbing that it propels him out of his comfortable routine and into a search for the tapes' creator. Two days later, Lindsey Redinius brings back She's All That and complains that something is wrong- 'There's another movie on this tape.' Curious, Jeremy takes a look. But when Stephanie Parsons, a local schoolteacher, comes in to return her copy of Targets, she has an odd complaint- 'There's something on it,' she says. It's the 1990s, pre-DVD, and the work is predictable and familiar he likes his boss, Sarah Jane, and it gets him out of the house, which has felt desolate and empty since his mother died six years before.
Jeremy works at the counter of Video Hut in Nevada, Iowa.
From the author of the acclaimed Wolf in White Van comes a horror-infused thriller set in a tiny Midwestern town.
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