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Universal harvester novel6/10/2023 ![]() ![]() But this is a small town in Iowa in the 1990s, those horrors have yet to take place, and Darnielle is up to something much different here.Īs the novel opens, Jeremy, a college graduate who is vaguely content with his current job as a Video Hut clerk, is alerted by several customers to the footage. The hood, the wraith-like pose, the spare surroundings: this isn’t far off from the famous photograph of the tortured prisoner from Abu Ghraib. Slowly, she lifts her left foot her right knee quivers, and half-buckles, but she holds the pose. She rises to her feet, or he to his, it makes no difference and it’s impossible to tell, and raises both arms from behind her back up and over her head, hands held like claws, fingers splayed and pointed downward as one poised to descend on the keys of a piano or shoot lightning bolts at the ground. ![]() Darnielle’s description of the ensuing action is startling: In the movie Targets, two scenes: an empty chair in an outbuilding, a workbench also partially visible then the same location, this time with a figure seated on the chair, wearing a canvas bag for a hood. In the middle of She’s All That, four minutes of a dark room, a person breathing, the sound of movement. At Video Hut in Nevada, Iowa, customers have noticed strange footage spliced into the movies they’ve rented. ![]() John Darnielle’s new novel, Universal Harvester, begins with a premise fit for a horror movie. ![]()
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