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

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I had never heard of a ‘Doom’ and on googling the Wenhaston Doom that Paver used as inspiration for the Wakenhyrst Doom, I found that the images were fantastic!

A blood-curdling ghost story, evocative not just of icy northern wastes but of a mind turning in on itself.” Stephen's fraught relationship with his brother Kits, was one of the main conflicts of the story. Besides Stephen, and sometimes Major Cotterell, I didn't like any of the white members of the expedition. They were either driven by greed and pride or cowardly in the face of injustice or common sense. It gave me a smug sense of satisfaction when Kits received his just desserts. 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.Lccn 2010467639 Ocr tesseract 5.0.0-alpha-20201231-10-g1236 Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 0.9634 Ocr_module_version 0.0.13 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA-NS-2000353 Openlibrary_edition For others that are looking for a spooky October read-- this story has no chilling or scary moments! I can't understand why that is even stated in the Publisher's summary. There is nothing in this book that comes close to being spooky, it is all cruelty and unfairness in the life of an intelligent young girl. 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. Once more we are in a cold, secluded, location, the Hilamayas instead of the Arctic. At first glance, this is quite similar to her previous story but the feel is quite different. I would guess that this kind of tale requires a remote and dangerous setting, somewhere secluded and cut off the real world. Kangchenjunga, as well as other mountains, are places of wonder, where the immense scale becomes alien, and where euphoria morphs with desolation. Additionally, opting for the 1930s golden era of mountain climbing adds somehow that fashionable 'old' feel to it.

Paver has written a seriously good, very original, genuinely creepy story and for that, we must say mange takk (Norwegian for thanks) -- Toni Whitmont * BOOKTOPIA * 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.” And I also have something bad to say about this novel: It fulfills every promise of the standard gothic mystery formula.

Although technically a ghost story, the real horror for me is the sense of creeping dread and isolation and loneliness as the last man left in the endless night of an arctic camp. Most chilling of all is the man’s horror at contemplating the afterlife should he perish there and become a ghost himself – not just a winter of endless night alone, but an eternity. 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.”