A Dark Matter [Paperback]

As per his mini-bio in the back of the book, Peter Straub has "written nineteen novels and won, multiple times, every award his expanding genre bestows," and so it follows that readers will come to A Dark Matter with a certain measure of anticipation. With what is perhaps his most ambitious fiction to date, however, Straub does not go about systematically catering to expectations. Far from it, in fact; though its tangled narrative stems from a seemingly simple premise - one man in the modern day must piece together the mysterious events that shattered and scattered his adolescent peer group - A Dark Matter is a difficult novel from the first page, wherein the semantic significance of the word 'obstreperous' brings a flood of difficult memories back to Lee Harwell.

Our protagonist is a reasonably popular novelist, treading water when we join him in search of his muse. He doesn't flounder for long: when Lee comes into possession of a late police detective's tell-all memoir, inspiration hits him like a ten tonne truck. To his surprise, the manuscript ties into the very events that his wife, the wonderful Eel, has hidden from him for decades. The desperate lawman's last-ditch attempt to expose a serial murderer represents something else to Lee, however: it is a way in, at long last, to the hidden history of an eventful few weeks in the 1960s.

All those years ago, Lee alone saw through Spencer Mallon, a wandering guru with so-called psychic abilities; the rest of his friends bought into the handsome stranger's supposedly spiritual powers wholesale. Lee's stubborn scepticism sets him forever apart from the awful events that followed Spencer's sham seduction of his nearest and dearest, in which an evening in a meadow left its susceptible young participants variously confused, crazed, blind, missing without a trace or, in one case, eviscerated as if by some nightmarish creature.

So far, you might say, so-so. Any reader with a passion for the horror genre will surely have come across one iteration or another of A Dark Matter's premise before, but Straub's approach is more unique. The underpinning narrative of his nineteenth novel is indeed Lee's, and further, the first version of the dark matter at its creeping, beating heart is his - an imagined, fictionalised interpretation - but the writer, not to mention the reader, derives a gathering understanding of the shocking events in the meadow only from those who experienced it first-hand. Throughout A Dark Matter, Boats, Hootie, Meredith, Dill and the Eel all state their respective cases, and each has a different tale to tell.

Straub does an admirable job of maintaining some sort of equilibrium between so very many perspectives, rendering them distinct from one another and yet binding them despite their dissonance; despite the countless contradictions and confusions and hallucinations. Together, the myriad individual slants coalesce into one single, intangible thing... a question, in some senses, voiced by Lee himself as he embarks on the journey of other-discovery that makes up the bulk of the narrative: "Is evil innate, and a human quality, or is it an external entity, and inhuman in nature?" For all its strengths, and let's not beat around the bush, they are many - Straub is an esteemed, award-winning author for good reason - the single most disappointing thing about A Dark Matter is that it never answers that question satisfactorily.

Then again, explanations are rarely as exciting as the endlessly promising questions that beg them; better, in the end, for some enquiries to remain unanswered. That said, A Dark Matter would be a considerably more rewarding read were it a little lighter on the mystique. There is ambiguity everywhere, and perhaps that is precisely the point, but it is not a point that resounds so easily by itself - for uncertainty to be truly useful in a narrative, there must exist some sort of backbone against which to measure it. For there to be a self, there must be an other. Clearly, Straub is not without such awareness: as one demon with an old-time New York accent observes to Eel, "Millions of dumbbells believe that death is evil, as though they thought they should be immortal. [But] without death, you would have no beauty, no meaning," and so, lacking any substantial counterpoint, the borderline lunatic musings of the teenagers who go with Spencer to the meadow are not so effective as they could have been.

Yet, for all its imbalance, A Dark Matter is a piece of literary entertainment just short of sublime. Straub knows very well how to spin a tale and his characters are extraordinary specimens, lively and surprising - particularly Hootie and the aforementioned Eel. A few of the narrative's beats are somewhat suspect, but we can only admire the experimentation of such an established author. I did not love A Dark Matter, this much is true, but as one particular hallucination would be quick to point out, hatred is not the opposite of love, and it is certainly an easy thing to admire Straub's nineteenth novel - if not to fall entirely under its metaphysical spell.

'Terrifying... Impossible to put down' said Stephen King on the front cover. Well, it wasn't and I did lots of times! The protagonist wasn't a likable character and was one dimensional as well as all the other characters and the final retelling, from the main character's wife, of the events that happened all those years ago was neither terrifying or intersting. I don't know why she took 40 odd years to retell her story and will tell it only once, without interruption, it was too long and boring.

I took this book on holiday expecting to finish it within a few days, it took two weeks and managed to finish it when the plane touched down. I didn't root for any of the characters and I found that there was no atmosphere to the story.

I give this novel one star, as it's a good pick for a holiday read, there's no way you'd finish it before you get back.

It's interesting that so many people seem to be disappointed with this book. Personally, I enjoyed it for its language and the psychology driving the characters. The "Event" that links all the characters together didn't seem to me to be the main point, rather it was the effect on the group of friends. However, I don't think it was terrifying, as Stephen King states but there were some eerie and thought provoking metaphysical moments. I'm not a quick reader but I did want to keep coming back to it.