Universal harvester

In the late 1990s, Jeremy works the counter at Video Hut in Nevada, Iowa, an aimless young man still hollowed by his mother's death. Then customers start returning tapes with something wrong on them—ordinary movies interrupted by grainy, disturbing footage that someone has spliced in. As Jeremy and the store's owner, Sarah Jane, try to understand who made the clips and why, the mystery opens onto other lives and other decades: a 1970s mother drawn into a drifter's cult, and a present-day family unsettled by what they find in a farmhouse basement.

John Darnielle's Universal Harvester wears the clothes of horror but beats with a quieter heart. It is a literary mystery about grief, loneliness, and the Midwest—about the marks people leave behind and the stories we assemble to make sense of loss.