We're thrilled to welcome John Darnielle to Sutton House where he'll be talking about his new novel, Universal Harvester, with Timothy J. Jarvis.
Jeremy works at the counter of Video Hut in Nevada, Iowa. It’s the 1990s, pre-DVD, and the work is predictable and familiar; he likes his boss, and it gets him out of the house.
But when a local schoolteacher comes in to return her copy of Targets, she has an odd complaint: ‘There’s something on it,’ she says. Two days later, another customer brings back She’s All That and complains that something is wrong: ‘There’s another movie on this tape.’
Curious, Jeremy takes a look. And what he sees on the videos is so strange and disturbing that it propels him out of his comfortable routine and into a search for the tapes’ creator. As the once-peaceful fields and barns of the Iowa landscape begin to seem sinister and threatening, Jeremy must come to terms with a truth that is as devastatingly sad as it is shocking.
John Darnielle’s first novel, Wolf in White Van, was a New York Times bestseller, a National Book Award nominee, and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for first fiction, and widely hailed as one of the best novels of the year. He is a writer, composer, guitarist, and vocalist for the band the Mountain Goats. He lives in Durham, North Carolina, with his wife and sons.
Timothy J. Jarvis is a writer, scholar, and teacher of Creative Writing with an interest in the antic, the weird, the strange. His first novel, The Wanderer, was published by Perfect Edge Books in the summer of 2014. His short-fiction has appeared in Murder Ballads, Booklore, Uncertainties: Volume I, Caledonia Dreamin’: Strange Fiction of Scottish Descent, 3:AM Magazine, and Leviathan 4: Cities, among other places. He is also interested in drone and ambient music and has collaborated with sound artists on sleeve notes and performance. In 2012, he was shortlisted for the Lightship International Short Fiction Prize. He currently lives in Bedford, a small town in the hallowed/cursed M1 corridor.
