A mysterious I also occasionally drifts into an otherwise third-person story, dropping philosophical clues and letting the reader know that someone else is most definitely in charge.Īs A Lyricist And Novelist, The Mountain Goats' Lead Man Writes About Pain The plot moves fluidly between three time periods: the 1990s, when an aimless, small-town video store employee named Jeremy discovers unsettling clips spliced onto random films rented out by his store the 1970s, when a young wife and mother, Irene, falls in with a cult following a garbage-eating drifter and the present day, when a retired couple and their college-aged children find a cache of disturbing videos in the basement of their newly-purchased farmhouse. This question does not lie precisely at the heart of Universal Harvester - the second novel from singer-songwriter John Darnielle - but certainly informs it at every turn. In a way, stories are our most prolific and dangerous serial killers, leaving behind plucky orphans, kind but overbearing widowers, the occasional wicked stepmother, and two questions: Where on earth did the mothers go? And why? Critics and scholars tie themselves in knots trying to identify the cultural significance of the missing-mother trope, which is pervasive and shows no signs of letting up. You may have noticed that mothers don't do so well in literature – stories both classic and contemporary tend to bump them off.

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Universal Harvester by John Darnielle