DNF @ 35%

Baaah. This turned into an incredibly cliched and boring story at around the 20% mark. 

Even tho the story picks up pace a little after we get to the father's journal, it is still an incredibly annoying and boring story with none of the characters being really interesting. 

Is this meant to be YA?

That's what it reads like to me, and that really is not a good thing.

Anyway, on to something more engaging.

I received a copy from Netgalley.

I love gothic horror mysteries and that premise was what attracted me to this book immediately. However, this book didn’t really fulfil my personal idea of a gothic horror mystery. That being said, the mystery aspect was really good and I really enjoyed the story.

It starts in 1966 and tells through news articles of a report granted a visit to a once grand house and the lady, Maud, who owns the property. The lady is a recluse and as a child witnessed the descent into madness of her father. No one really knew what happened (this was back in 1913) and the house seems to have remained in a similar state since. The reporter has been digging into the history of the father and the mystery surrounding the demise of a once prominent and respected man from a highly well to do family. There’s rumours of witchcraft and devil worship and all sorts of superstitious things.

The lady retells the story as she remembers it and her father growing up from when she was a small child to when she was a teenager and when the incident happens.  The story tells of Maud’s troubled adolescence - she’s an intelligent child who wants more out of life than what her station will allow. Her father is a tough man to please – a historian. As she grows up Maud eventually manages to convince her father to allow her to use his library also helping with his translation of an old text with a religious theme.

We see passages as well from the father’s notebook, detailing his inner thoughts as the situations occur, with Maud, with his research and a secret from his childhood which haunts him and is driving him to the brink of madness. There’s a definite religious overtone to the father’s inner journals, demons and sins and secrets and penance and so forth. Though it’s well handled without being overly dramatic and overly preachy.

Maud discovers her father’s journals and begins her own investigations. It’s really quite fascinating and once you get used to the style of writing hard to put down. I’m not recapping a lot of the plot as it would be very spoilery. Maud was a really likeable heroine, strong willed and sensible, her voice was very easy to follow and as the novel evolves as a reader you really want her to succeed in her tasks.

There was nothing remotely scary or chilling about it so it didn’t hit the horror mark for me, but it was quite atmospheric.  The mystery was really good and it had a satisfying ending. I really enjoyed the book and would definitely read something by this author again.

Thanks to Netgalley and Head of Zeus for approving my request to view the title.

DNF @ 127p. (of 255p.)

Dark Matter was Paver's first book for the general adult readership, and it shows. To me, this still reads like a YA novel and I cannot get invested in the story or the main character's situation.

What is worse to me, reading Dark Matter after having read Thin Air, is that Dark Matter reads like a practice piece - that, with a few tweaks, would develop into Thin Air later. 

I ended up skipping ahead to the end of the story and am glad to have done so. The similarities with Paver's later book are very strong, so I do not feel I missed much by "abridging" this read.

1966. The late Edmund Stearne,a gentleman and a murderer,creates a bit of a stir in the modern art world with his triptych that he painted while being a guest at Broadmoor,a high security psychiatric hospital. Because,yes, Edmund was a murderer. Right?

1906. Maude lives with her family in Wake's End,a rather grim, isolated manor surrounded by marshes and fens. Her father, Edmund Stearne,an egocentric, inspired historian with a predilection for medieval history has more than a tight grip on his household and after the death of her mother life becomes just a bit more unsettling for 15 year old Maude. She discovers her father's diary and so secretly follows his musings and thoughts. When Edmund discovers the Doom,a painting that represent the Last Day of Judgement,in the churchyard things start to break down for him. Present and past demons haunt Edmund and very slowly he becomes a more than tormented and haunted man. The outcome is both tragic and horrific...

This is a gothic story,a crime story and the story of the downfall of a human being. The bleak and haunting fens are a perfect background for this very atmospheric and mesmerizing story.

"Dark Matter" is a ghost story of the kind only a master storyteller can get right. The sense of bone-deep, hair-raising, hope-defeating dread builds with a slow inexorability that is almost too much to endure.

It is a book that seems at first to about the atmosphere of a place and the state of mind of an individual producing an unshakable uneasiness. This defensive explanation of fear as a product of the confluence of nature and character turns out to be too brittle to stand against the truth: the presence of something deeply malevolent, unrelentingly vengeful and entirely supernatural.

"Dark Matter" tells, mostly in journal form, the story of a 1937 British scientific expedition to the Arctic that ended disastrously.

The journal writer is Jack Miller a lower-middle-class man who sees himself as having, through no fault of his own, "missed his chance" to make a career. At twenty-seven, to change his life, he signs on to be the radio operator for a five-man Arctic expedition, made up of privileged, Harrow and Oxford educated young men, none of whom have any Arctic experience.

Michelle Paver uses the journal format with great skill to let us see what the journal writer sees and all the things that he doesn't see because he takes them for granted or they sit in a blind spot created by ignorance or inexperience.

In the early parts of the journal Jack is focused on the differences between himself and his upper-class companions, yet I was struck most by how similar they all are in their innocent unpreparedness and their unconscious sense of invulnerability.  These young men are unable to imagine the reality of the terrible power of a winter. Although they have no experience of the Arctic, they are confident that, with the right kit, some teamwork and a bit of pluck, they can conquer it. This combination of ignorance, self-confidence and wealth is probably one of the most lethal forces on the planet.

The expedition is dogged by bad luck from the beginning, so that, by the time they are encamped in the Arctic, Jack is accompanied only by Gus the charismatic leader of the expedition, Algie Gus' annoying, huntin'-shootin'-fishin' best friend winter and a pack of huskies. As full winter arrives, events conspire to leave Jack alone for a time with the darkness, the dogs and a nameless malevolent presence.

The power of this book comes from the quality of the writing, which subtly creates and sustains an atmosphere of creeping dread, one small scene at a time, letting your imagination fall slowly into the endless dark of an Arctic night until you feel the overwhelming isolation of being alone in a deadly cold darkness so silent you can hear yourself blink. Then Michelle Paver cranks up the horror by introducing an awareness of a manifest evil, a dread that is nameless only because daring to name it would make it too real to be borne. 

There is one journal entry that describes Jack becoming lost in fog on Halloween night, a short distance from the cabin he can no longer see. Nothing happens. Probably. Yet the passage held more fear in it than any confrontation with a monster could have produced.

I found the ending of the story very satisfying. There we no shortcuts and no cheap thrills, only the knowledge of how evil, once met, changes the lives of everyone it touches.

My enjoyment of the story was greatly increased by Jeremy Northam's skilled narration. Click on the SoundCloud link below to hear an extract.

[soundcloud url="https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/117937492" params="color=#ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true&visual=true" width="100%" height="300" iframe="true" /]