A cassette had heft, and inserting it, watching it, rewinding it when you were done left you with the feeling that you were manipulating a physical thing. Unlike the digital, streaming media that would eventually replace it, VHS insisted on its own materiality. Here, the novel’s preoccupation with the VHS tapes that Jeremy rents out takes on a special importance. Home is a treadmill, and powers beyond our control regulate its pace. If we don’t fit into the world we know, it’s because that world is always changing, with or without us: A Home Depot crops up by the highway, or an old crush moves to California. “Sometimes you just want to figure out how to fit yourself into the world you already know,” Darnielle writes. In time, a pattern begins to emerge from these stoicisms, one that tells a quiet story about our estrangement from familiar people, places, and things.
Instead, Darnielle’s novel belongs to what might be called the literature of disquiet, a sentiment that emerges as much from his syntax as from the content of his story.
Though Universal Harvester sometimes teases true horror, that promised menace never quite materializes. Fittingly, then, Darnielle’s novel ultimately proves itself to be an exploration of-if not quite a meditation on-the experience of loss writ large. Personal tragedy has a way of imbuing objectively small concerns with a sense of cosmic import. If our characters are tortured, it’s only by the pains they’ve already known. But then, much as they sometimes did on the X-Files, all those eldritch implications simply dissolve, replaced by more quotidian revelations. You have the sense that Darnielle’s protagonists are being pulled toward or into something monstrous, something otherworldly. Studying them becomes an obsessive project: People print out frames, seeking patterns in the grain of these low-resolution images. Most of those who glimpse these clips are similarly troubled and similarly fascinated.
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