Universal Harvester

Jeremy works at the counter of Video Hut in Nevada, Iowa. It's the 1990s, pre-DVD, and the work is predictable and familiar; he likes his boss, and it gets him out of the house. But when a local schoolteacher comes in to return her copy of Targets, she has an odd complaint: 'There's something on it,' she says. Two days later, another customer brings back She's All That and complains that something is wrong: 'There's another movie on this tape.'Curious, Jeremy takes a look. 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. As the once-peaceful fields and barns of the Iowa landscape begin to seem sinister and threatening, Jeremy must come to terms with a truth that is as devastatingly sad as it is shocking.PRAISE FOR JOHN DARNIELLE'An eerie but lovingly detailed delineation of a landscape that, like all landscapes, is part external reality and part memory Darnielle understands that there are things writing can approach but must pass over in silence. He risks those silences; listen.' The Guardian'A major work by an author who is quickly becoming one of the brightest stars in American fiction.' The LA Times