Universal Harvester by John Darnielle
John Darnielle's first novel (after the uncategorizable critical novella Black Sabbath's Master of Reality ), Wolf in White Van , got a lot of attention and made the longlist for the 2014 National Book Awards . I read it when it came out, since I adore Darnielle's work as singer-songwriter for The Mountain Goats , and thought maybe he'd be okay at writing novels, too, though I tried not to get my hopes up. After a few pages, I was entranced, and read the book quickly, almost in a fugue state, stopping only because at times I found it emotionally overwhelming. I never wrote about it because I didn't know how to do so in any way other than to say, "Go read this." To explain what made the book such a rich reading experience for myself would require delving into a lot of weirdnesses of personal response, useless to anybody else, and to talk much about the plot and structure would be to give away part of the novel's magic. I am not at all a spoiler alert...
