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John Darnielle

Book - 2017

"The second novel from the author of Wolf in White Van, inspired by his years living in a small town in Iowa"--

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Subjects
Published
New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2017.
Language
English
Main Author
John Darnielle (author)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
214 pages ; 22 cm
ISBN
9780374282103
Contents unavailable.
Review by New York Times Review

THE IMAGINEERS OF WAR: The Untold Story of Darpa, the Pentagon Agency That Changed the World, by Sharon Weinberger. (Vintage, $17.) Few know much about Darpa - populated by a "procession of nuts, opportunists and salesmen," Weinberger tells us - but the group helped shape modern life and modern warfare. Some notable inventions: stealth aircraft, armed drones, Agent Orange and even the internet. EXIT WEST, by Mohsin Hamid. (Riverhead, $16.) In this elegant meditation on refuge, exile and home, a couple flee their unnamed country riven by civil war. Hamid weaves the surreal into his tale: Magic doors separate the dangers of home from the perils of a new life. The novel, one of the Book Review's 10 Best Books of 2017, is this month's pick for the PBS NewsHourNew York Times Book Club. STEVEN SPIELBERG: A Life in Films, by Molly Haskell. (Yale, $15.) A feminist critic's take on the filmmaker focuses on his Jewish identity. Praising the match between biographer and subject, our reviewer, Lisa Schwarzbaum, wrote, "The exploration here is lively, the critic is deeply informed and she approaches her mandate with a calmness of inquiry that is a gift often bestowed on the outsider anthropologist impervious to tribal influences." UNIVERSAL HARVESTER, by John Darnielle. (Picador, $16.) At the local Video Hut where Jeremy works as a clerk, someone begins splicing violent, vaguely malevolent scenes into the tapes, and his Idaho town is shaken. As his friends and family are consumed by the phenomenon, Jeremy pursues the mystery, culminating in a final reckoning at the remote farm where the scenes were filmed. Darnielle, the lead singer for the band the Mountain Goats, counteracts the sinister with acute sensitivity in this story, his second novel. WHY TIME FLIES: A Mostly Scientific Investigation, by Alan Burdick. (Simon & Schuster, $17.) Burdick, a New Yorker staff writer, investigates how we experience the passage of time: varying perceptions of duration; how humans agreed on the common measure of an hour. His account doesn't satisfy every question, but it opens up new lines of inquiry into the subtle and profound ways humans process time. NO ONE IS COMING TO SAVE US, by Stephanie Powell Watts. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $16.99.) A riff on "The Great Gatsby," this debut novel centers on the fates and fortunes of AfricanAmerican families in modern-day North Carolina As our reviewer, Jade Chang, put it, "Watts is interested in what black people are allowed to want - and allow themselves to want - in 21st-century America."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 30, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* It's the late 1990s, and shifts at the Video Hut in Nevada, Iowa, are pretty dull. Jeremy has to get a better job and he's knows it worse, his dad knows it. And then, he fields a couple of complaints. There's something weird on the VHS of She's All That and also the Boris Karloff flick Targets. What Jeremy begins to discover is unnerving: short black-and-white scenes of hooded people in some kind of barn spliced onto the tapes, some of them frightened. With the help of a curious customer, Jeremy track down the source: a strange woman living in an isolated farmhouse. Jeremy's Video Hut boss becomes involved with the woman and her videos, which leads to a tale about the disappearance of a strip-mall church's entire membership. Darnielle's masterfully disturbing follow-up to the National Book Award-nominated Wolf in White Van (2014) reads like several Twilight Zone scripts cut together by a poet. Darnielle fast-forwards, rewinds, and occasionally even ejects the plot to insert a new one, never letting readers establish a footing. All the while, his grasp of the Iowan composure-above-all mindset instills the book with agonizing heartbreak. Memories, Jeremy learns, are impermanent and misleading, no matter what sort of blood and tears you graft onto your copy of Star Trek: First Contact.--Kraus, Daniel Copyright 2016 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Beginning on the cusp of the 2000s and spanning more than 25 years, the second novel from Darnielle (Wolf in White Van) is a slow-burn mystery/thriller whose characters are drawn together by an eerie discovery. In his early 20s, Jeremy Heldt lives with his father, Steve-Jeremy's mother was killed in a car accident six years before-and bides his time clerking at the Video Hut in Nevada, Iowa, waiting for better prospects to arise. It's a steady job that keeps him out of the house, though things turn weird when customers begin to report dark, disjointed, unnerving movies-within-the-movies on their rented VHS tapes. At first reluctant to become involved in tracking down the origin of the clips, Jeremy, at the urging of his acquaintance Stephanie Parsons, uncovers the tragic decades-long story behind the videos and experiences an unsavory side of Iowa that he never imagined could exist. Powerfully evoking the boredom and salt-of-the-earth determination of Jeremy, his friends, and a haunted survivor determined to redress a great loss, Darnielle adeptly juggles multiple stories that collide with chaotic consequences somewhere in the middle of nowhere. With a nod to urban legends and friend-of-a-friend tales, the author prepares readers for the surreal truth, the improbable events that "have form, and shape, and weight, and meaning." Agent: Chris Parris-Lamb, the Gernert Company. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Far from a midcareer side project, this unsettling second novel from the frontman of indie folk band The Mountain Goats confirms the promise of his National Book Award-nominated debut, Wolf in White Van. Jeremy Heldt is working at the Video Hut in small-town Iowa during the late 1990s when a customer returns her VHS rental, complaining that another movie appears to have been spliced in-not much action, just some faint breathing. Soon after, another customer reports something similar, this one involving a figure in a chair with a bag tied around its head. Jeremy's boss Sarah Jane recognizes the barn in this second video and ultimately gives up the video store trying to find answers. From this spooky premise, Darnielle goes further into an oblique, moving meditation on grief: Jeremy's mother was killed in a car accident when he was younger, and the woman whose barn Sarah Jane identifies lost her mother to a religious sect more than 20 years earlier. Their losses haunt the novel, as does the foreboding Iowa landscape. VERDICT Darnielle's contemporary ghost story may confound with its elusiveness (who is the mysterious "I" narrator?), but its impact will stick with readers. [See Prepub Alert, 8/15/16.]-Michael Pucci, South Orange P.L., NJ © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.