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A review by lamphouse
Universal Harvester by John Darnielle
4.0
really 3.5 but rounded up out of respect for the man. the pov changes were a little clunky at times, but something about the way darnielle describes things in such seemingly simple ways makes everything just a touch more terrifying, and a touch more saddening as well. it's full of a bleak mystery, then a bleak, creeping horror, and then an equally bleak hope (that, to be fair, i didn't feel was fully cohesive, but that's another story). the ending felt a bit strained, the hope that it points towards made less effective by its brief resurgences earlier on with other characters jumping ahead in time, but the getting there was so good i barely cared.
yesterday i was talking to my friend about thriller books and this in particular, about how i can watch hours and hours of scary movies and never once experience the same kind of fear or edge-of-my-seat, staring-at-a-slow-motion-trainwreck thrall i get from a good book. with films, if i turn it off, i don't have to think about it anymore. sure the good ones stay with you, give you images to linger over in the space between flicking the lights off and getting into bed, but books are different. you're half of the creation—the story gives you the words, the general look, a specific here and there, but you fill in the rest. the image is yours, created with the bits and pieces your brain knows will best make it stick, and you can never just turn that off. on page 29, after jeremy first watches the clip in she's all that and is trying to go to sleep, he talks about how the scene won't leave his head, "How it sped up and slowed down as his brain tried to find some context within which to situate it. The image seeking out and finding the internal circuits where it would be able to live forever. The figure under the canvas, rising." that's the feeling i'm talking about—except here, it doesn't have to find the circuits. it came from them in the first place. being an active participant in the visualization is what makes "She, or he, wears a canvas bag for a hood" (22) so terrifying all on its own, and what makes the shadows lurking in the corners, the things you know are just there out of sight, enough to paralyze you as though you were in the one in the dark.
anyway, i really enjoyed this. i'm a big fan of the mountain goats, and specifically john darnielle's lyrical prowess, so i was really really pleased to see that that same skill translated into prose. (every time i explained who the author was when someone asked what i was reading, they all said that it makes sense he would be a good novelist as well as lyricist? which is silly—they're drastically different forms. count me definitively impressed, mr. darnielle. cheers.)
yesterday i was talking to my friend about thriller books and this in particular, about how i can watch hours and hours of scary movies and never once experience the same kind of fear or edge-of-my-seat, staring-at-a-slow-motion-trainwreck thrall i get from a good book. with films, if i turn it off, i don't have to think about it anymore. sure the good ones stay with you, give you images to linger over in the space between flicking the lights off and getting into bed, but books are different. you're half of the creation—the story gives you the words, the general look, a specific here and there, but you fill in the rest. the image is yours, created with the bits and pieces your brain knows will best make it stick, and you can never just turn that off. on page 29, after jeremy first watches the clip in she's all that and is trying to go to sleep, he talks about how the scene won't leave his head, "How it sped up and slowed down as his brain tried to find some context within which to situate it. The image seeking out and finding the internal circuits where it would be able to live forever. The figure under the canvas, rising." that's the feeling i'm talking about—except here, it doesn't have to find the circuits. it came from them in the first place. being an active participant in the visualization is what makes "She, or he, wears a canvas bag for a hood" (22) so terrifying all on its own, and what makes the shadows lurking in the corners, the things you know are just there out of sight, enough to paralyze you as though you were in the one in the dark.
anyway, i really enjoyed this. i'm a big fan of the mountain goats, and specifically john darnielle's lyrical prowess, so i was really really pleased to see that that same skill translated into prose. (every time i explained who the author was when someone asked what i was reading, they all said that it makes sense he would be a good novelist as well as lyricist? which is silly—they're drastically different forms. count me definitively impressed, mr. darnielle. cheers.)