![]() ![]() What appears to be a chilling horror tale is also a perfectly rendered story about family and loss. The novel centers on a small, independent video store in the town of Nevada, Iowa, in the late 1990s whose tapes start coming back with mysterious and sometimes terrifying clips spliced in the middle. In “Universal Harvester,” the brilliant second novel from indie rocker (the Mountain Goats) and author John Darnielle, the possibility of that kind of surprise becomes a terrible reality. There was always the possibility of surprise - a mislabeled tape or a prankster foiling the copy protection tab and adding a weird home movie at the end of “Sleepless in Seattle.” But those who grew up in the ’80s or ’90s might still feel a twinge of sadness when they pass by a vacant storefront that used to house VHS tapes, despite their unreliable video quality and passive-aggressive “Be Kind, Rewind” stickers. ![]() ![]() It’s hard to feel nostalgic for video stores in an age when renting a movie - thanks to the Internet - is easier than making a cup of coffee. ![]()
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