Do you think much about life in Iowa? I actually think I DO think about life in Iowa more than might be assumed – I don’t live that far from Iowa, and I used to do some pretty regular work traveling from St. Louis to Lincoln and Omaha and other small towns scattered around Nebraska. Sometimes, driving to Nebraska we’d get close to or even pass through Iowa for a brief period of time. Although these trips had very little to do with my day to day life, and even on those visits I mostly spent time in the bigger cities which were much like cities anywhere else. I also once dated someone who lived in a very small town in Illinois, and we would basically spend weekends at his house, taking his boat to the lake or deciding between THE Chinese restaurant or THE Mexican restaurant. Oh, wait, there was also an Italian place. On my drives through small towns in Missouri and Nebraska, and ever so briefly Iowa, I’d superimpose these images from weekends spent in a small town in Illinois, and imagine what life must be like in THIS small town. Who was fixing local politics, who was mourning a recently lost pet, who was waiting on the weather to turn to buy that new [fill in the blank]. Universal Harvester deposits us in the middle of a small town – Nevada, Iowa (and I will admit ashamedly that there were more than a few references to Nevada that made me wonder if these characters were driving across state lines regularly until I realized … it’s the town, not the state). We meet a handful of characters living in Nevada and a few surrounding small towns (Collins, Colo) and we learn briefly about their individual and intersecting tragedies. This haunting novel is not so much a tour of a small town, it’s more like a brief invitation to become a voyeur.
Jeremy works at a video store in the late 1990s. He’s in his early 20s, and is considering what options the world still has available for him beyond Nevada, Iowa – but after losing his mother and being his father’s only companion for so long, he remains in place, fixated on his routines. One day, a schoolteacher returns a video and says, “There’s something on it.” When someone else also brings in a different video with a similar complaint, Jeremy investigates. The investigation is the central mystery of the story – what are these images, spliced into videos available in a commercial video store? This was the time before DVDs, the videos were actual VHS tapes, which makes the central conceit possible. Jeremy, some other employees at the store, and we the reader are embroiled in this strange activity. While the book asks and answers questions about who is doing this and their purpose, the tale is really about an impossible search.
If you, like me, are still waiting on Devil House but you haven’t yet read anything by John Darnielle, this was a fine introduction to him as a novelist. I think poets write my favorite books generally – I don’t mind a great deal of navel gazing, and I really enjoy the introspective characters. If you’re more interested in atmosphere than plot, this could be a great way to spend a rainy weekend.