There are other scenes like this on other tapes, which have rightfully freaked them out. The camera moves to a door, then gets flipped on its side, right before someone speaks “Wait. An unseen figure from behind the camera extends his hand, which is holding a paintbrush, and begins to trace shapes onto the person’s hood. At least she appears to be strapped to the chair, but she stands up and starts making a series of alien yet graceful poses, like someone trying to mimic ballet after only reading about it in books.
In one of those scenes, a hooded figure sits strapped to a chair inside of what appears to be an outhouse. But that’s not the case here, Darnielle warns: “In this version, he keeps his job at the Video Hut, and then something else happens.”įor example, the tape of Targets starts out normally before narrative is interrupted by scenes that aren’t in the original film-which someone like Jeremy, who doesn’t know much about a movie like Targets, can easily tell. Darnielle teases versions of the story where Jeremy’s curiosity subsides, and he’s able to find a happier ending, moving to a bigger city or finding a better job. As he inches toward some explanation of the videotapes, we get references to police reports, diaries of main characters read years later.
This is the unsettling lead to John Darnielle’s second novel, Universal Harvester, a book about twenty-somethings unraveling a mystery located within the sleepy Midwestern sprawl.
Recently, customers at the Video Hut in Nevada, Iowa-the video rental store where Jeremy works, and which Sarah Jane owns-have returned copies of teen rom-com She’s All That and Peter Bogdanovich-directed drama Targets that they claim are just a little… off. Nothing interesting ever goes on in rural Iowa, but nevertheless, something strange has happened to Jeremy Heldt and Sarah Jane Shepherd.
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