Now, Darnielle is back with a second novel, Universal Harvester. Set in 90s small-town Iowa, the novel centres on Jeremy Heldt, a young man who works at the counter of the local video store. His days are quiet and predictable, the gentle rhythm of counting cash in the register, of reshelving slot returns, of waiting for the 5:30 rush as people get off work and drop in to grab their night’s entertainment. But, perhaps predictably, this rhythm doesn’t last long. A customer returns a copy of the Boris Karloff movie Targets with concerns that something’s not quite right. “There’s something on this one”, she says. And so begins a strange and ominous story in which Jeremy tries to figure out the nature of the disturbing footage that has been spliced into some of the store’s VHS tapes.

Even reading that super concise summary, you might already be forming ideas on what sort of novel this might be. But it’s not quite as simple as that. In fact, Darnielle’s narrative threatens to take one of many turn-offs as it unfolds, before veering away onto a different road entirely. The opening suggests something akin to a Mountain Goats song, a coming of age story set amidst small town loneliness and the aftermath of grief, while the appearance of the sinister home movie splices seems to signal a shift to horror. Later still we have a plucky potential love interest who wants to play detective, perhaps signalling a Stranger Things-style ‘neighbourhood (still, just) kids confront creepy goings on’ adventure.

But the truth is we don’t get any of that. Or we get all of it, it’s hard to tell. The unfolding narrative remains elusive, fractured into pieces that are too slippery or malformed to fit together into something so cohesive as a genre. Shifts in both voice and time add to this effect, stories other than Jeremy’s stitched into the narrative in a manner not unlike those creepy VHS segments.

Perhaps linked to this guessing game Darnielle plays with the reader, Universal Harvester is also preoccupied with alternate futures, of how things might have turned out different if the characters had made different decisions, had been different people. All of this is backed up with some at-times breathtaking prose, the flat, open Iowa landscape captured with a sense of sadness and foreboding. Take, for example, the following description of a house fire.

“And indeed, all the way down to the present day, Jeremy will sometimes see himself replaying the payoff he’d first imagined, that vivid unrealised presentiment: of taking matters into his own hands and turning the CLOSED sign around before sundown. Driving to Collins. Heading down a gravel road, a cloud of dust rising from his back tires as he goes towards the Titanic orange beacon of Lisa Samples house, now in flames, oil-black smoke ascending into the Iowa sky in a single furious column, the sound of the fire reaching him before he was physically near enough to hear it, the rumble and the roar”.

The Iowa landscape could be considered one of the novel’s main characters. Indeed, the only one that’s present throughout each segment. It’s refreshing to read a novel not set in New York or LA, and which treats its reader with the same kind of understated modesty that’s displayed by the families. As Colin Barrett put it in his review for The Guardian, “there is no distancing smugness, no grating whimsy and no urge to mansplain to the nation”. Darnielle is happy to pose the puzzling questions and let us ruminate on them.

Universal Harvester is out now on Scribe in the UK and Farrar, Straus & Giroux in North America.

We would usually make a mixtape of songs to accompany this book review, but this time we don’t need to go through the effort. John Darnielle has recently released a new Mountain Goats album, Goths. Get it from Merge Records or the Mountain Goats Bandcamp page.

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Stretching over 600 pages, the novel includes a semi-mythic colonel, his psy-op serving nephew, Vietnamese double agents, humanitarian nurses, too-young-soliders-turned-crazed-lurps and disgraced navy sailors struggling to readjust to life back in Arizona (the latter being Bill Houston, who will eventually grow/descend into the antihero of Johnson’s debut novel, Angels). By the closing stages, the various narrative strands have twisted and tangled to the degree that confusion arises, the reader in effect joining the characters in the bush and hacking through a literary jungle of their own. How do we piece together these small scraps of experience into something coherent and important? And is it enough to explain and justify the war, or human nature itself?

“It’s got to be about something bigger than dying, or we’d all turn deserter. I think we need to be much more conscious of that.”

Johnson passed away in May, though not before being made aware that he was to receive the Library of Congress’ Prize for American Fiction. Tree of Smoke is out now on Picador and Farrar, Straus and Giroux and is available at all good book shops. Those unfamiliar with his work would be well advised to check out his novels (Angels), novellas (Train Dreams) and short story collections (Jesus’ Son), as well as his essay collection, Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond.

P.S. If you like strange, sprawling books about Vietnam and conspiracies, then you’ll be into David Means’ Hystopia.

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A book within a book, Hystopia is actually the novel left behind by Eugene Allen, a Vietnam vet from a slightly-alternate version of the 60s where John F. Kennedy survived Oswald’s assassination attempt and is serving his third term in office. Opened and closed by various notes and testimonies from friends and family members, Allen’s work makes up the majority of the novel, a narrative imagining characters from his time in Vietnam once they return home. The kicker, though, is that while they are back in the States, they never really ‘get home’, with the war following them back to a dystopian (but far from unrecognisable) America ravaged by biker gangs and forest fires.

In an attempt to solve the crisis of PTSD and violence, the government turn to an experimental psychiatric method called ‘enfolding’, where veterans reenact traumatic scenes while dosed up on a tranquilliser, Tripizoid. While even the doctors working on the project believe the technique to be without substance, it proves paradoxically effective for many subjects and blanks memories of combat. “Confusion is undoubtedly an element of the curative process,” writes Means. “In most cases the patient does forget about it, becoming fully immersed in the reenacted trauma’s nullification of the real trauma”.

Which isn’t to say it’s a silver bullet. Indeed the novel opens with a “failed enfold,” Rake, a man filled with the sort of all-consuming rage and propensity for violence unique to men forced into the sacrifices of war only to end up on the losing side. We find him with Allen’s sister, Meg (whom he has almost certainly kidnapped, and has undergone some degree of enfolding too), as they drive across Michigan on an anarchistic rampage of murder, drugs and destruction. Eventually, they reach the home of Hank, Rake’s former sidekick who has developed a love of trees since enfolding, a man who tries to protect Meg and figure out a way in which they can save themselves from Rake.

The second strand of the story deals with another enfold Singleton and his colleague Wendy, government officials breaking protocol to meet up and fall in love, who somehow end up on the trail of Rake, as though their rule bending was in fact a conspiracy on the part of their superiors to engineer the operation. Again though, confusion reigns, with Singleton’s boss admitting that a key part of being a commander is having the “gumption to go back and revise history”, talking of writing operation plans after the operation in order to ensure they are correct.

This sense of counter-history runs throughout the novel, from Singleton and Wendy’s quest and Hank’s transformation into peaceful nature-lover, right down to Eugene Allen’s re-telling (re-imagining?) of his sister’s story. What becomes important for these troubled people is not discerning the capital-T Truth but rather finding a variation they can believe in. More often than not, this involves a sense of mission, the victim’s need for order in the face of chaos, the desire for purpose or meaning in “an age when everything else seemed to be spinning deeper and deeper into despair,” anything which enables them to form a narrative of the world in a way they would like it to exist.

“It was crazy, he admitted, but it kept him going and like all good delusions it was fuelled by genuine hope and dedication to the truth”

And that’s what sets apart David Means’ Vietnam from that of the postmodern cannon. Yes, it is full of claims and counter-claims and impenetrable paranoia, but rather than using these to trace a descent into bewilderment, Hystopia utilises them to chart a way out. In a world where confusion and conflict constitute the resting face of the planet, maybe disinformation is needed not to obscure the truth but rather create it?

Here’s a playlist of songs that are suitable or relevant in one way or another, or maybe just capture the mood of certain characters and scenes.

Tracklisting:

1) Search and Destroy – The Stooges
2) IN EVIL HOUR – Battle Ave.
3) High & Wild – Angel Olsen
4) My War – Black Flag
5) Everything Falls Apart – Hüsker Dü
6) Saigon Shrunken Panorama – The Mountain Goats
7) Rugged Country – Japanese Breakfast
8) Meg – Hovvdy
9) Love, Come Save Me – Right Away, Great Captain!
10) I Need You To Tell Me Who I Am – John Moreland
11) Drugs To Make You Sober – Jeremiah Nelson
12) Are We Failing? – Hallelujah The Hills
13) Flaming Home – Mount Eerie with Julie Doiron and Frederick Squire
14) Lovers as Mirrors – Paper Bee
15) Forgetting is Believing – Nathaniel Rateliff
16) Redemption:1 (An Army Man And His Self-Discovery) – Justin Vernon

Hystopia is out now via Faber & Faber (UK) and Farrar, Straus and Giroux (US) and you can get it from most good bookshops. Check out the other works by David Means on his Goodreads page.

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“Sean is 3-dimensional/real/alive because he is at once remarkably kind and empathetic and capable of destroying lives. In some ways he is ignorant beyond hope and in others understanding beyond all expectation”

Well the good news is that John Darnielle is back with a new novel. Universal Harvester apparently hits a “sad/frightening axis”, which supposedly means a blend of straight up B-movie terror and horrors more human in nature, things like loneliness and sorrow and grief. The preview on the FSG website gives a few more details, claiming that the work is a” significant literary leap” in terms of scope and craft, describing the general plot like something between Infinite Jest, The Ring and a grown up sequel to Eerie, Indiana.

Twentysomething Jeremy works at a late 90s Video Hut in small-town Iowa that’s just about to be transformed/finished by the dawn of DVDs and the internet, though he seems “blissfully unaware” of such forces. The twist is that customers keep returning tapes that are apparently damaged or tampered with, like She’s All That‘s four minute interruption of “grainy, homemade, black-and-white footage that is distinctly creepy-as-hell—there’s a darkness there, an overwhelming sadness”. Jeremy, like all good video store clerks/literary protagonists, explores just what is going on with the strange stock, though we’re going to have to wait and see just what path Darnielle sends him down.

Universal Harvester is set for release on the 7th February, 2017 on Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and you can pre-order it now from most good book shops.

Book design by Rodrigo Corral and Alex Merto

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Wolf in White Van is a story about reality and imagination and how both can be beautiful and both can be scary and both need to be treated with care. The protagonist Sean Phillips, recently disfigured, creates a postal adventure game called ‘Trace Italian’ to pass the time and escape from his injury-induced isolation. The world he creates is a desolate and dangerous post-apocalyptic wasteland, a place which acts as a safe haven where Sean and the players can not only flee their own lives but take complete control of another. In the game, players journey across the land in an attempt of finding the inner sanctum, a mystical place of safety that no player has ever reached. I don’t want to get into the plot too much as I don’t want to spoil things, but the structure of the novel’s narrative is similar to the game, orbiting some central answer or truth that is never quite reached.

The idea of a new life is important. The game allows an existence that is far more exciting than reality yet fundamentally safe, some other dimension where the laws of physics and biology and history do not necessarily apply. For example, the dystopian world of Trace Italian might be irradiated and full of bounty hunters but death is not easy to come by. “It’s very hard to die, because all the turns pointing that way open up onto new ones, and you have to make the wrong choice enough times to really mean it.” (Pg 157) Mistakes are not severely punished and players get a second (third, fourth) chance when choosing the wrong option. This sits in stark contrast to Sean’s experience in real life where one bad decision changed everything in seconds with no hope of return.

But just how permanent and binding real life’s choices are is a matter of perspective. There is an argument that the game is not a contrast to Sean’s life but a reflection, a direct mirror of his experience. As traumatic and affecting as his incident was, he is given some semblance of a second chance. For all of the physical and psychic suffering he faces, the bottom line is that he survived. To return to page 157, it’s very hard to die.

Patrick deWitt (author of the excellent The Sisters Brothers) described WIWV as “a hymn for those who inhabit lonely universes, and a harbour for anyone who has sought refuge in a reality other than their own.” I feel this goes a good way to getting at the heart of the novel. Much of Darnielle’s song-writing concerns outsiders who are humiliated or neglected or just plain ignored, but always resisting in their own way, always fiercely alive. Sean’s disfigurement serves as an obvious example of this idea of separation and social exclusion – a young person who looks or acts or lives differently is treated with wonder or terror or both and finds he misses out on basic and fundamental aspects of the human experience through no fault of his own. Sean’s injury is obviously vital to certain aspects of the plot, but in others it is just another manifestation of a common problem – he is different. He could just as easily love men or paint his nails or collect cards and wear black t-shirts emblazoned with dragons, he would still join a vast ensemble of Darnielle’s characters who are in the same position.

Whether or not Darnielle would want his musical career dragged into every mention of his literary one is up for debate (I’d imagine it could get annoying being labelled as ‘that Mountain Goats guy’ rather than a National Book Award nominated author) but, hell, we’re a music website, we have an excuse to dig too deeply into past lyrics. I could really use some footnotes here to save clogging up the text with quotations but you’ll have to live with it. The obvious first point of call is 2004’s We Shall All Be Healed, an album that reportedly draws upon Darnielle’s adolescent years for inspiration. The song ‘Mole’ is particularly interesting, with allusions to digging and deserts and hospital beds. Some of the lines seem very much relevant to WIWV: “I came to see you up there in intensive care / They had handcuffed you to your bed / There were tubes going into you and out from you / Bright white gauze bandages at your head […] Out in the desert we’ll have no worries / Out in the desert just you and me.”

The song ‘Cotton’ on the same album also has a line which seems fitting: “This song is for the people / who tell their families that they’re sorry / for things they can’t and won’t be sorry for.” Indeed, if you look hard enough (too hard, perhaps) there are lyrics relevant to the novel across the whole MG discography. ‘Game Shows Touch Our Lives’ from Tallahassee contains the line: “People say friends don’t destroy one another / what do they know about friends?” and The Sunset Tree’s ‘Hast Thou Considered the Tetrapod’ reads: “and alone in my room / I am the last of a lost civilization / and I vanish into the dark / and rise above my station.” ‘The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton,’ a contender for my favourite MG song, explores a similar outsider-with-convictions theme, namely a pair of goth/heavy-metal types planning to outpace, outlive and get even. The track contains a line which seems to capture the central tenet of Darnielle’s writing. “When you punish a person for dreaming his dreams don’t expect him to thank or forgive you.”

John Darnielle’s talent (dare I say genius) is taking the admittedly gratifying Outsider Gets Revenge story (or the sequel – Unnoticed Becomes Noticed: Through Violent Means) and making it less clear-cut, more human. Sean is not a character eternally consumed by rage or frustration, and his fixation on fantasy seems a longing for the cruel-but-clear world of binary morality and total conviction. Sean is 3-dimensional/real/alive because he is at once remarkably kind and empathetic and capable of destroying lives. In some ways he is ignorant beyond hope and in others understanding beyond all expectation. Through it all, one thing is clear: he is not evil or noble, hero nor villain. He is not Conan the Barbarian.

Wolf in White Van was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the US and Granta in the UK. You can buy it now from all good bookshops and bad online corporations.

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