Everybody has their thing everybody has some sort of grief. I started doing that, and as the story develops, I had objections with my own ideas. “I wanted to try my hand at writing normal lives a bit. “Part of what I was doing with that first scene was trying to write something normal, because Wolf in White Van is so weird,” he says. Very late in writing the first draft, Darnielle found his answer and the threads began coming together. I could say accurately and vividly what they are, but I couldn’t say why they are.”Īfter completing his first novel, Wolf in White Van (which was nominated for the 2014 National Book Award), Darnielle felt confident enough in his writing process to take his time crafting Universal Harvester’s direction. I let myself go for a long time without any explanation in the first draft. It looks a little frightening, and you don’t know what it is. “I described the scene, and it was scary. “I didn’t have any explanation for it when I wrote it,” he says. Darnielle created the scenes without having a sense of what they meant, feeding the readers’ questions without immediate concern for answers. From that somewhat mundane opening scene, Darnielle spins on a ghostly dime, driving into a story about grief, resiliency and the never-ending search for human connection.Īt the narrative’s core are tapes returned to the Video Hut with unexplained footage added-homemade scenes of horror that Jeremy feels compelled to investigate.

There’s a conversational rhythm and style, like the way men talk to each other at the beginning of a shift.”ĭarnielle’s exercise produced about 10 pages of a scene, a conversation between a man returning movies and Video Hut clerk Jeremy, talking about their favorite fishing spots. In Iowa, you don’t meet many people like that. “I’m a fake extrovert I generally keep to myself.

“It wasn’t a deep moment of revelation or anything I was trying to write a scene that sounded like the conversations I heard in Iowa,” he says in a phone interview with Paste. The book began as Darnielle’s effort to capture the speech patterns that had been rattling around in his head for 15 years. It’s a vanished world-in more ways than one-but Darnielle drew on those memories for his second novel, the unsettling and suspenseful Universal Harvester. Living in small-town Iowa in the late 1990s, John Darnielle was a regular at the video rental store the next town over, picking up VHS tapes and Nintendo 64 cartridges.

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