From the road it’s like a painting, a huge mural, endless, ongoing.īut, more importantly, he is sensitive and empathetic in his exploration of just about every character. Corn, though: it hoists itself skyward all by itself, determinate, until the long green leaves on the stalks grow heavy and begin to droop in autumn. There are as many bean fields now as corn, but nobody remembers those, their rows green and spiky and nearer to the ground. Darnielle has a strong grasp for telling detail in communicating regional character and nicely establishes a sense of place for rural Iowa, such as in this moment where he describes what it’s like watching corn fields from your car while driving down the highway:Īt sixty-five miles an hour, the cornfields flicker against the window like stock footage shadows in between the rows pulse steadily in shades of yellow and green and early brown.

Where Wolf in White Van left a sense of a tightly controlled, air-locked static character study, intense yet strangely brittle, Universal Harvester ’s narrative unfolds from its starting premise to an end destination, and destinations along the way, that few readers would anticipate from the beginning. To get the easiest assessment out of the way: Universal Harvester is a complex, brooding, and insightful novel, and a strong improvement from John Darnielle’s debut Wolf in White Van, which itself was impressive overall.

Universal Harvester by John Darnielle