Dark Matter: the gripping ghost story from the author of WAKENHYRST

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Having really enjoyed, “Dark Matter,” I was keen to read this, new novel, by Michelle Paver. Normally, I dislike comparing an author’s novels, but there is much to compare in, “Thin Air,” to “Dark Matter.” Both deal with remote places and extreme temperatures. Both are, essentially, ghost stories… Compelling… direct… relentless” writes Helen Rumbelow in The Times. “Dark Matter is terrific. It is a ghost story, but it is also a metaphysical meditation on what lies beneath our little lives.” Paver has written a similar book to this one called Thin Air, cold snowy horror, ghosts & isolation etc, so I was worried this one would feel too samey for me to really appreciate it, but boy was I wrong! ⁠

Dark Matter – Michelle Paver

I could feel the chilly winds and the cold in this one and the eerie feel of the mountain really comes to life in her vivid writing. Dark Matter is terrific. It is a ghost story, but it is also a metaphysical meditation on what lies beneath our little lives.” Her fen, “alive with vast skeins of geese… the last stretch of the ancient marshes that once drowned the whole of East Anglia”, casts “a dim green subaqueous glimmer” over her story; Maud, poised between superstition and religion, is inexorably drawn to it. “‘Don’t you nivver go near un,’” she’s told by her hated nurse. “‘If’n you do, the ferishes and hobby-lanterns ull hook you in to a miry death.” Like all good heroines, Maud doesn’t listen. This is pacey, readable historical fiction with a good sense of period and atmosphere. I enjoyed Pearce’s narration, and the one-upmanship type of relationship with his brother adds an interesting dimension to the expedition dynamics. However, I never submitted sufficiently to Paver’s spell to find anything particularly scary. I’ll try again with her other ghost story, Dark Matter, about an Arctic expedition from the same time period. Thus I fear that I am unable to help you. I wish you well with your work. However I must ask you not to apply to me again.

Paver is the mistress of suspense. The strangeness that humans can suffer from when exposed to the Arctic wilderness is brilliantly exploited in this period piece.” Thin Air is an interesting book about a group that decides to climb Kangchenjunga in India. I was quite fascinated with the books premise. Horror stories that take place in isolated places are great and I was quite looking forward to being swept off my feet. Unfortunately, it didn't happen. I liked the story, but I didn't love it. There were interesting moments, but I just felt that I never really connected with either Stephen Pearce or his fellow travelers. I liked the idea that one of the men from the previous expedition was left behind and that Stephen Pearce felt haunted. But, it just never got really interesting. Author Michelle Paver was another wonder to me. Her knowledge of life in the Arctic is so extensive I had to find out more about her and read that Michelle traveled to Finland, Greenland, Sweden, Norway, Arctic Canada, and the Carpathian Mountains. She has slept on reindeer skins, swum with wild killer whales, and gotten nose to nose with polar bears and wolves to research her books. That explained why her book was so realistic and believable. Finding a good horror novel – a truly resonant one, that manages to terrify you, entertain you, make you care for its characters, all while simultaneously giving you food for thought (and potential nightmares) – that is an increasingly rare thing, I think. It has been a long time since I’ve found a horror novel (or film, for that matter) that has managed to incite all of these emotions in me.

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Ghosts - or fictional ones, at least - tend to haunt inhabited places, whether houses, churches, castles or hospital wards. So used are we to the traditions of the genre that a description of a decrepit mansion full of dark corners and unexplained creaks is enough to raise in us readers expectations of phantoms and ghouls. In this regard, Michelle Paver's "Thin Air" - much like its predecessor Dark Matter - is not your typical ghostly tale since it is the very remoteness of the haunted spaces which makes the setting particularly eerie. The context of "Thin Air" is a 1935 expedition to the summit of the Kangchenjunga in the Himalayas, the third highest peak in the world. A team of five Englishmen, including narrator Stephen Pearce and his brother "Kits", set off in the footsteps of a disastrous 1907 expedition, made famous through the memoirs of its leader Edmund Lyell. It turns out, however, that Lyell's memoirs might have left out some of the more unsavoury details of that doomed attempt, as our intrepid protagonists will discover to their dismay. Indeed, memories and relics of the Lyell expedition seem to cast a pall over the new climb. In the interim, she “took a bit of a wrong turn”, becoming a biotechnological patents lawyer for 13 years. “I thought, ‘I’m quite good at exams, why don’t I do law for a couple of years and maybe I’ll be published by then?’” After years of trying to write in the evenings and at weekends, and not really wanting to be a lawyer at all, she “had to jump off the treadmill”. She resigned without a book deal. During her six months’ notice period, she landed one. “My earnings fell off a cliff. I went from six figures to earning less than a student teacher. But it was unbelievable how much it felt like the right thing. I didn’t have to dress up in Armani trouser suits, I could just wear jeans.” The skipper of the Isbjorn, Mr Ericsson, is reluctant to take them to the bay they have chosen, Gruhuken, and wants to drop them off ‘forty miles short’.....he will not say why. The workers on the ship, helping to assemble the camp will not stay overnight........ there are rumours and discontentment.On a trip to the Malangen fjord in northern Norway, she went out into the snow one night and the northern lights appeared: “Not the massively lurid ones you see in documentaries, but it was like a twisted arrow or arch pointing north, and it gave me an idea. What if one of the trio leaves? And that’s when the ideas started fizzing.”