At that moment, I sensed I was not alone.
Would you like to be scared? I think I have the solution. Dark Matter is an intriguing ghost story and one perfect for the run up to Halloween. Michelle Paver weaves a delightfully spooky tale with a 1930s Arctic setting, the background of intense cold and lack of daylight very fitting for a story dealing with loneliness, paranoia and fear.
Dark Matter takes the form of the journal of Jack Miller as he joins an ill fated expedition to the remote bay of Gruhuken. He’s an edgy young man, conscious of the class distinction between himself and his fellow adventurers, and at first finding himself unable to establish any affinity with them. Paver plays on this well, with Jack picking up on the slightest tension which sets the reader up for what’s to come, where an overactive mind is left to work a touch overtime.
At first it all appears to be familiar territory of the ghost story. The expedition charters a boat and the Captain is reluctant to take them all of the way; there’s something unspeakable that happened at Gruhuken. Eventually arriving, the crew try to dissuade them from tearing down the encampment of previous settlers. There’s a distinct aroma of folklore and superstition. In the midst of this Jack thinks he has encountered a ghost, and whilst reasoning that a ghostly apparition can only frighten and not harm, he struggles to keep his thoughts rational.
Paver is successful in making this a gripping story in how Jack’s narrative is so convincing. She’s visited the Arctic herself, and so the description of it is rich, varied and believable. But what’s most arresting is that no matter how Jack attempts to rationalise events the reader can taste his increasing fear, and fear in a narrator works extremely well in stirring the same in the reader. A series of problems leaves Jack alone at the camp, where he attempts he attempts to keep isolation at bay by following a strict regime, exercising himself in the bitter darkness and attending to his dogs, his only living companions. But the rot of fear sets in, and he begins to succumb to his imaginings and compulsive desire to look out of the window…
This is an engaging and scary novel that’s highly recommended.
A New Domain but Business as Usual
…or perhaps back to business as usual as these pages have been rather quiet of late.
I’m blaming it on large books. Bricks. Doorstoppers. Whatever you want to call them. I completed The Life and Death of Peter Sellers by Roger Lewis, an obsessional biography at over 1000 pages. Then came Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. This is a book I was determined to finish after several false starts in the past. I loved it up until a point – the point being around page 300 when all hope of comprehending the novel began to seep away. Sadly I was just pleased to complete it and toss it aside; Pynchon became an irritation rather than a joy. I was ultimately depressed with the sheer weight of it. I feel like a mountain climber who just collapses after reaching the summit in need of a lot of rest. There’s no real sense of exhilaration.
Is that the end of mammoth books for now? I doubt it, I still have The Tin Drum to read…
Aren’t there always those moments, just before the blow falls that change things forever?
The latest from Susan Hill appears at an appropriate time of year. I always associate October and the creeping onset of winter with ghost stories, and so welcomed the publication of The Small Hand. This short supernatural tale isn’t quite as strong as The Woman in Black or The Man in the Picture. That’s not to say it’s unsatisfying, and I would recommend this to any follower of Hill or the ghost story genre.
Adam Snow is a dealer in rare books, travelling the world buying and selling although one location has a particular draw for him. This is the archetypal house of sinister tales; abandoned, derelict and with the accompanying overgrown wilderness of a garden. It’s here that he arrives by accident and where he first encounters The Small Hand, an invisible force that grips him with a terrifying compulsion whenever he is near to water. Hill invests her story with some genuinely scary moments. I particularly liked how Snow is drawn towards finding out more about the ghostly presence rather than being frightened of it. The scene where he meets a mysterious stranger during one of his return visits to the old house is brilliantly visualised, as are Snow’s frequent descents into vivid dreams and nightmare.
The Small Hand is set in the present day, although apart from fleeting references to email and the internet, a reader would be forgiven for thinking it was set in the immediate post war period. Snow appears to live in a world devoid of modern technology, one where he can only follow his trail with the aid of newspaper cuttings and old photographs. Perhaps this is due to a familiarity with Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger, which deals with some similar themes. The Small Hand is effectively creepy, but would suit the short story form better than the short novel, sitting comfortably in a large anthology of ghostly winter tales.
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