I'd give it 3.5 if I could. I thought "Wolf in White Van" was literally perfect, so my expectations were probably high. Also, the suggestion this was a "horror novel" was woefully inaccurate. Without the expectation of horror I might have enjoyed it more, I suppose. Darnielle's writing is just as phenomenal, but the plot is so chopped up and disjointed, jarringly so, as it shifts parts especially, and I'm still not totally sure what happened. It demands a second read, though I'm only partially confident I'll come away with a better understanding of what happens between the covers. *UPDATE* After second read...still tricky to stitch it all together. But it's taught and concise and intriguing.

had some good spooky vibes at the start that reeled me in, but i was ultimately left very unsatisfied between the lackluster ending and pov switches. it's a disservice to this book to advertise it as horror, i would have been more forgiving if i hadn't expected more due to the label

I fully admit that I read this book solely because I loved the cover art and style. It tells the story of a video store clerk in Iowa who finds strange and disturbing clips recorded over the store's VHS tapes. I loved the initial premise of this book because it reminded me of The Ring franchise and movies like Broadcast Signal Interruption and Censor. Unfortunately, I didn’t connect with this story or any of the characters. I was bored during the majority of this book. It feels like this story meanders after the initial introduction of the disturbing VHS tapes and then it explores random fragments from the lives of the characters. This story meditates on ideas about grief and moving on from tragedies, but I was so distracted by what this story could have been (with the disturbing VHS tapes) that I wasn’t able to appreciate or care about what it actually was. Being disappointed after a promising start, I wanted to see what readers who loved this book have said. Most readers who love this book say things like “you need to understand the author as a musician to fully understand the story” or “I love fragmented storytelling, plots are overrated”, and those are all valid opinions, but I personally feel like a story has to stand on its own legs independent of the author’s identity and needs to be marketed properly in order to be loved for what it is. I feel like this book wanted to be as surreal and mysterious as Twin Peaks, but fell short. I only rate books one star if I truly hate and despise them, and while I don’t feel that strongly about this book, I do feel like it should be rated lesser than books I previously have rated two stars. I would have preferred if this book made me feel strongly in a negative way, but this book didn’t make me feel anything at all. I don’t know who to recommend this book to or who the target audience is. This is the kind of book that I’ll forget about within a day and never think about again.

A horror story without antagonist. Honouring and questioning rural homeliness and human twistedness. Haunting, in a toothache-on-the-brain style, and with his characteristic eye for detail, but not operating at the heights of ravaged beauty we know he can reach. In the movies, people almost never talked about the towns they spent their lives in; they ran around having adventures and never stopped to get their bearings. It was weird, when you thought about it. They only remembered where they were from if they wanted to complain about how awful it was there, or, later, to remember it as a place of infinite promise, a place whose light had been hidden from them until it became unrecoverable, at which point its gleam would become impossible to resist. There are perhaps too many passages that drift off from a concrete event into abstraction, and which then finish on a short, suggestive raised-eyebrow sort of sentence. Like: He had lost a lot of blood. His eyes were half-open, and he seemed to recognize that somebody he knew was with him, but he said nothing. He drew great, deep breaths at intervals. The sky above was showing early afternoon flashes of orange, its constant variations flooding the horizon in changing color bars like on the title screen from that weird Charles Bronson movie, the one where he steals a sword from Toshiro Mifune on a train. Red Sun." Nerd haiku. Master of Reality is still his best fiction; his lyrics 1991 - 2009 are still his best words.

Not at all what I expected or wanted.

“In the movies, people almost never talked about the towns they spent their lives in; they ran around having adventures and never stopped to get their bearings. It was weird, when you thought about it. They only remembered where they were from if they wanted to complain about how awful it was there, or, later, to remember it as a place of infinite promise, a place whose light had been hidden from them until it became unrecoverable, at which point its gleam would become impossible to resist.” ― John Darnielle, Universal Harvester

Well that was a fine mess. The basic premise as it's set out in the opening is interesting, touches of the Ring and In Cold Blood. But, the atmosphere never really fits. Darnielle spins the occasional poetic passage, but a mood this does not make. The perspective jumps around in really disorienting ways. And honestly, for me the story really lacked a gravitas and direction. I persisted only because I hoped the core premise/mystery would be resolved.

[3.5]

Well, that was weird. I hadn't read Darnielle's other book, Wolf in White Van, and I had little interest in picking it up- synopsis just didn't really appeal to me. Maybe if I had I would have been less pleasantly surprised by just how bizarre this story was. I mean, I did expect some weirdness, as I did read the summary on the flap, but I didn't know I get some David Lynch horror here. More specifically, I kept thinking of the first episode of the Twin Peaks revival, with the glass box that had all the cameras trained on it and the constant atmospheric humming. And the shadowy demon that ate the horny couple's faces off, but mostly the first part. I also want to take this moment to say that I really liked that it took place in Iowa, especially because prior to reading this the only other book I read that ever took place in Iowa was The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson, and this book could not be more different than that one (though I highly, highly recommend the latter). Subject matter-wise, this book isn't exactly the creepiest book in the world. But the atmosphere is where the most of the horror elements come in. I was impressed by this to say the least- most authors focus solely on plot when writing horror, simply because that is the easiest and most effect way to write horror books, much in same way that horror directors do. But if Darnielle had focused purely on plot, this, in my opinion, wouldn't be a horror novel. It would be a mystery-thriller with some horror elements, but not a horror book the way we think of horror. Instead, Darnielle focuses on the setting and atmosphere of the book, allowing that to add the creepiness needed. In that respect, he reminds me yet again of David Lynch and how Lynch works with cinematography and especially sound to make a shot as unnerving as possible. The nonlinear storyline made this book a bit hard to follow, at first, but at the same time, I wasn't too bothered by it. My favorite part was part three, I believe, that followed Lisa's family and explained, somewhat, the reason for the tapes- though it took me a while to figure that out- but I also kind of liked all of the parts. I was surprisingly unbothered by the lack of development in the characters. Perhaps because in this book, it's clear that these characters are pawns for telling the story and not meant to be well-developed any more than a few backstories or a dead mother here or there. I did, however, want more of the cult, but that's just me. I'm interested in cults, but the two books I've read about them- Awake, which I admittedly didn't read for an actual realistic take on cults, and The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly, which only was okay because I ended up not liking any of the characters and thinking the author seemed awfully proud of herself for writing that book. So that part of this novel was interesting to me. Continue reading this review on my blog here: https://bookwormbasics.blogspot.com/2...