Jeremy works at the Video Hut in Nevada, Iowa. It is a small town in the state of the state. This is the late 1990s, and even if the Hollywood Video in Ames poses an existential threat to Video Hut, there are still regular customers, a rush in the late afternoon. Jeremy: It's a job, quiet and predictable, and it gets him out of the house, where he lives with his dad and where they both try to avoid missing Mom, who died six years ago in a car wreck.

He has been ordered from the store. He has an odd complaint: "There's something on it," she says, but does not elaborate. Two days later, a different customer returns a different tape, and says it's not defective, exactly, but altered: "There's another movie on this tape." Jeremy does not want to be curious, but he brings the movies home to take a look. And, indeed, in the middle of each movie, the screen blinks dark for a moment and the movie is replaced by a few minutes of jagged, poorly lit home video. The scenes are odd and sometimes violent, dark, and deeply disquieting. There is no identifiable faces, no dialogue or explanation - the first video has just the faint sound of someone breathing-- and there are some recognizable landmarks. It's just outside of town.

So begins John Darnielle's haunting and masterfully unsettling Universal Harvester the once placid Iowa fields and farmhouses now sinister and imbued with loss and instability and profound foreboding. The novel will take Jeremy and those around him. They will become part of a story that unfolds years into the past and years into the future, part of an impossible search for something.