It seems a fair whack of readers (at least on Goodreads) seem to have a problem in the way that Universal Harvester doesn’t provide conclusive explanations of what happens in the work. Can something awful really be something benign? How much stock should you put in appearances? And how far should you push something? There’s snatches of clarity throughout the text, which offer both hope and horror in turn.

The answer is circuitous, and as twitchy as a poorly-tracking tape. Is it a virus? A snuff film? A testament? How do you decide what to do?Īnd what does it mean, especially in a life circumscribed by routine? Lost footage-style interruptions, with a distinctly strange cast. On the face of it, Universal Harvester is the story of what happens when a video store schlub discovers weird interruptions have been spliced into rental tapes. It’s a consideration of how history is made, and how those same records can be viewed differently in the light of a little information. John Darnielle’s second novel is a little bit of a love story to the period, while also managing to be a ghost story, a thriller, a tribute to the boredom and joy of a life lived small, as well as a meditation on movement by spirit. You know, the time before streaming services, when people had to rent videotapes, and what was known was limited by hard-copy research, or – more often than not – relied on hearsay and rumour, at least as far as local history was concerned. You know, there’s a lot to be said for the pre-Internet era.

Universal harvester review